In this paper an economics approach to assessing community values in health care priority setting is examined. The approach is based on the concept of ‘willingness to pay’ (WTP). Eighty two parents were interviewed with regard to three aspects of provision of child health services. For each aspect a choice of two courses of action was presented. Parents were asked which course of action they preferred and what was the maximum amount of money they would be prepared to pay for (...) this rather than their less preferred option. WTP responses are acceptable to the majority of respondents and appear to ‘behave’ in accordance witha priori expectations. A method of assessing the influence of ability to pay on preferences and WTP is outlined. Preferences and WTP do not appear to have been unduly distorted by ability to pay. Use of WTP data does have the potential to provide health care purchasers and providers with information on intensity as well as direction of the preferences of members of the community. (shrink)

Although researchers have paid much attention to the widespread cheating by students during their college careers and the possible sources behind such unethical behaviors, there has been less attention given to the unethical behaviors of faculty. Research on the types of unethical behaviors of faculty has pointed out the unique nature of higher education and the particular pressures placed on faculty as potential drivers of such behavior. In this paper, we examine the factors and underlying cognitive processes that may drive (...) faculty to engage in such behaviors. Specifically, we identify potential drivers of faculty unethical behavior, the cognitive processes activated by these drivers, and the types of behaviors that are considered most ethically questionable among faculty as they carry out their professional roles. We conclude with research considerations and implications of faculty misconduct on the profession. (shrink)

Machinery Hill. Edibles on a stick. Livestock competitions. Princess Kay of the Milky Way. The Grandstand. The Midway. It must be State Fair time!

The grammatical manipulation and production of language is a great deceiver. We have become habituated to accept the use of well-constructed language to indicate intelligence, understanding and, consequently, intention, whether conscious or unconscious. But we are not always right to do so, and certainly not in the case of large language models (LLMs) like ChapGPT, GPT-4, LLaMA, and Google Bard. This is a perennial problem, but when one understands why it occurs, it ceases to be surprising that it so stubbornly (...) persists. This paper will have three main sections. In the Introduction I will say a little about language, its aetiology, and useful sub-divisions into natural and cultural. In the second section I will explain the current situation with regard to large language models and fill in the background debates which set the problem up as one of increased complexity rather than one of a qualitatively different kind from narrow or specific AI. In the third section I will present the case for the missing phenomenological background and why it is necessary for the co-creation of shared meaning in both natural and cultural language, and I will conclude this section by presenting a rationale for why this situation arises and will continue to arise. Before we do any of this, I need to clarify one point: I do not wish to challenge the ascription of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to LLMs, indeed I think agnosticism is best in this respect, but I do challenge the more serious, and erroneous, ascription of understanding, intention, reason, and consciousness to them. And so, I am making two points: an epistemological one about why we fall into error in our ascription of a mental life to LLMs, and an ontological one about the impossibility of LLMs being or becoming conscious. (shrink)

This article examines the contribution that poetry written over the last fifty years might make to the established and burgeoning field of Medical Humanities. It takes poems by women about cancer and depression as a case study of how they can offer insight into the impact of these conditions on the sufferer. Collectively, the poems document and effect shifts in knowledge about, and the associated stigmas concerning, illnesses that carry secrecy and shame, specifically cancer and depression. Additionally, drawing on Virginia (...) Woolf’s remarkable essay “On Being Ill”, we see how the non-verbal features of poems, particularly metaphors and symbols, mark the space of what a patient cannot fully articulate. Accordingly, the poems discussed illuminate how literature can express human interiority but at the same time remind the reader – or health professional – that interiority can never be fully presented. Thus, poetry both contributes to and also checks the ways in which literature is appropriated by the biomedical sciences. The poets included are Eavan Boland, Julia Darling, U.A. Fanthorpe, Jackie Kay, Gwyneth Lewis, Carol Satyamurti and Jo Shapcott. Some poems specify a female subjectivity, some express agency as autonomous individuals, while others presume to speak of common human experience. (shrink)

This paper argues that the various approaches to ethics that bioethicists rely on are not adequate to provide effective moral guidance in how to avoid a series of looming human catastrophes (associated with such threats as environmental degradation, war, extreme poverty, and pandemics). It proposes development of a new approach to ethics, dubbed public ethics, that simultaneously investigates moral responsibilities at multiple levels of human organization from the individual to international bodies. It argues that feminist relational theory can provide guidance (...) to development of this new type of ethics, and it warns against obstacles bioethicists face in its pursuit. (shrink)

Wollstonecraft's early works express a coherent view of moral psychology, moral education and moral philosophy which guides the construction of her early fiction and educational works. It includes a valuable account of the relation between reason and feeling in moral development. Failure to recognize the complexity and coherence of the view and unhistorical readings have led to mistaken criticisms of Wollstonecraft's position. Part I answers these criticisms; Part II describes and textually supports her view.

Should the insane and the mentally ill be held morally responsible for their actions? To answer ‘No’ to this question is to classify the mentally abnormal as not fully human: and indeed legal tradition has generally oscillated between assimilating the insane to brutes and assimilating them to children below the age of discretion, neither of these two categories being accountable in law for what they do. In what respect relevant to moral responsibility were the insane held to resemble brutes and (...) children? In the case of brutes, the answer seems to have been that the doings of the insane appeared to lack whatever it is that marks out human actions as distinctively human. What the insane did could not be thought of as issuing from deliberation, or as capable of having issued from deliberation, but seemed rather to be the result of the unbridled operation of nature — if a diseased nature. The natural comparison with insane killings seemed to be, for example, the killing of birds by cats. This distinction between animal doings and human actions does not depend on Cartesian views about the workings of animals; the operation of nature need not be thought of as mechanical. The thought is simply that where there is no room for deliberation there is no room for moral appraisal. Children, on the other hand, though capable of distinctively human action — i.e. of deliberating about what they do — were held not to be capable of the relevant kind of deliberation: for they were held ‘not to know the difference between right and wrong’. (shrink)

The essays in Part III of the book, on liberal constraints and traditionalist education, argue for a more regulatory conception of liberal education and emphasize the need for some controls over cultural and religious educational authority. Susan Okin, in her essay on group rights, gender, and realistic rights of exit, is mostly concerned, not with the oppression of traditional groups by the liberal state, but with the oppression of individuals, and especially of girls and women, by the traditional community. (...) She is critical of those liberal theorists who argue that a right of exit is sufficient to qualify a cultural or religious group for special recognition in liberal societies, and to counter these views, she notes that the unequal treatment of girls and women can mean that even though they may have a formal right to exit a group, their actual opportunities for doing so are far less adequate than those of their male counterparts. She holds, then, that the right of exit is not sufficient and that the liberal state should have a higher requirement, namely, that girls and women should be treated fairly within the group and thus should be able to take advantage of any formal right of exit. The chapter is arranged in three sections: Section 12.1, Gender and Other Forms of Inequality in Group Rights Theories, shows, by looking at three examples of liberal defenders of group rights, that they tend not to take gender inequality seriously when considering group rights and limitations; Section 12.2, Cultural Factors Affecting Women’s Realistic Rights of Exit, specifies and discusses a number of reasons that contribute to women being significantly less able than men, in many cultural contexts, to chart their own courses of life outside their community of origin; and Section 12.3. Rights of Exit and Realistic Rights of Exit for Women, concludes that the theories examined contain several problematic elements concerning rights of exit for women. (shrink)

This book presents the first full translation of the correspondence of Leo Strauss and Gerhard Krüger, showing for each the development of key and influential ideas, along with seven interpretative essays by leading Strauss scholars. During the early to mid-1930’s, Leo Strauss carried on an intense, and sometimes deeply personal, correspondence with one of the leading intellectual lights among Heidegger’s circle of recent students and younger associates. A fellow traveler in the effort to “return to Plato” and reject neo-Kantian conventions (...) of the day, Krüger was also a serious student of Rudolf Bultmann and the neo-orthodox movement in which Strauss also took an early interest. During the most intense years of their correspondence, each underwent significant intellectual development: in Krüger’s case, through a penetrating series of studies of Kant and Descartes, respectively, ultimately leading to Krüger’s conversion to Catholicism; and, in Strauss’s case, through the complex stages of what he subsequently called his “reorientation,” involving what he for the first time calls “political philosophy.” Readers interested in tracing the development of Strauss’s thoughts regarding a theological alternative that he found helpfully challenging—if not ultimately compelling—will find this correspondence to be an accessible point of entry. (shrink)

The problem of synthetic judgments touches upon the question whether philosophy is in fact capable of making independent truth statements. According to Kant, synthetic judgments formulate the conditions for the possibility of objectively valid knowledge a priori. As far as empirical attempts at reinterpretation of the aprioristic fall short of this ambition, Kant’s a priori goes deeper. This is because modern science strives towards objective knowledge, although its statements are fundamentally fallible. The topic of synthetic a priori thus continues to (...) be relevant. -/- This paper will show that, in order to be viable at all, a modernized version of transcendental philosophy must ‘depart from’ the concepts of “independence from empirics” and/or the “purity” of the aprioristic. Kant’s reflections on non-pure synthetic a priori knowledge already contain attempts at this. Furthermore, the aprioristic validity of knowledge does not exclude the possibility, that it can be discovered empirically. Fries and, subsequently, Nelson proceeded with this separation (initially ascribed to Reichenbach) between the contexts of validity and discovery of knowledge, pointing out that the a priori can indeed be discovered empirically, yet never be proven. -/- Currently, there are still a number of valid reasons for arguing that concepts from transcendental philosophy continue to be of fundamental importance for the modern sciences. However, it must not be neglected that, even within a modernized framework of transcendental philosophy various unsolved problems remain and/or are created (such as the unfeasibility of the aprioristic claim to general validity and necessity, the problem of drawing a clear boundary between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds). Moreover, the “beautiful structure” of the Kantian system, which constitutes much of its persuasive strength, is lost. (shrink)

Patriarchal theologies which obstruct women’s leadership in the Anglican Church and impede ‘collaborative’ ministry prompt this exploration of the reluctance to relinquish male metaphors for God, even when intimate relationship rather than gender is stressed as the crucial concept of Trinitarian theology. Despite the ambiguities of using female terms for the divine and of establishing the oft-neglected Holy Spirit as female imaginary in the Godhead, Father-idolatry and sub-ordinationism in the Trinity need to be challenged. ‘Midwife’ is suggested as a feminine (...) term for the 3rd Person, signifying non-gendered action but retaining personhood. This would creatively renew Trinitarian doctrine, the Church and its leadership as reflections of the perichoretic Godhead. (shrink)

This publication is an appreciation of the natural philosophy and epistemology of the philosopher Grete (Henry-)Hermann. A student of the mathematician Emmy Noether and the philosopher Leonard Nelson, she was one of the early interpreters of quantum mechanics. Werner Heisenberg memorialized her in his book "The Part and the Whole". For the first time, her writings on natural philosophy and epistemology are collected in one volume. An extensive introduction by various authors introduces the work of Grete Henry-Hermann. This edition is (...) supplemented by excerpts from correspondence on natural philosophical and epistemological topics, including correspondence with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Werner Heisenberg, and Gustav Heckmann. Contents ● Grete Henry-Hermann's contribution to the interpretation of quantum mechanics ● Grete Henry-Hermann's work on the relationship between modern physics and transcendental philosophy ● Grete Hermann's dissertation: The Question of the Finitely Many Steps in the Theory of Polynomial Ideals (1925) ● Discussions on the question of free will and the significance of behavioral research for the critique of reason ● Excerpts from correspondence from 1925 to 1982. (shrink)

This Element examines the entirety of Kant's Critique of Taste with particular emphasis on its political and moral aims. Kant's critical treatment of aesthetic judgment is both an extended theoretical response to influential predecessors and contemporaries, including Rousseau and Herder, and a practical intervention in its own right meant to nudge history forward at a time of civilizational crisis. Attention to these themes helps resolve a number of puzzles, both textual and philosophic, including the normative force and meaning of judgments (...) of taste, and the relation between natural and artful beauty. (shrink)

Two decades of literature and discussion on the topic of therapist-client sexual relationships have revealed much about the nature and consequences of these relationships and have produced an explicit prohibition against such relationships in American Psychological Association (APA) Ethical Principle 6a. This article reviews the literature as it relates to the ethically gray area of sex with former clients. The relative lack of an empirical basis for extending the prohibition of Principle 6a to posttermination relationships is noted. This article describes (...) concepts from three theoretical perspectives about psychotherapy that support an extension of the prohibition to sexual relationships with ex-clients. (shrink)

The role of mathematics in scientific practice is too readily relegated to that of formulating equations that model or describe what is being investigated, and then finding solutions to those equations. I survey the role of mathematics in: 1. Exact solutions of differential equations, especially conformal mapping; and 2. Simulations of solutions to differential equations via numerical methods and via agent-based models; and 3. The use of experimental models to solve equations (a) via physical analogies based on similarity of the (...) form of the equations, such as Prandtl’s soap-film method, and (b) the method of physically similar systems. Two major themes emerge: First, the role of mathematics in science is not well described by deduction from axioms, although it generally involves deductive reasoning. Creative leaps, the integration of experimental or observational evidence, synthesis of ideas from different areas of mathematics, and insight regarding analogous forms are required to find solutions to equations. Second, methods that involve mappings or transformations are in use in disparate contexts, from the purely mathematical context of conformal mapping where it is mathematical objects that are mapped, to the use of concrete physical experimental models, where one concrete thing is shown to correspond to another. (shrink)

Abstract:Social contract is rapidly becoming one of the significant alternatives for analyzing ethical issues in business. Contractarian approaches emphasizing consent as a means of justifying principles can provide needed context for rendering normative judgements concerning economic behaviors. Current research issues include developing tests of consent for both hypothetical and extant social contracts, and empirically testing the assumptions of the major contractarian approaches. Open questions include exploring the relationship between contractarian business ethics and other approaches, such as stakeholder management and virtue (...) based ethics; and analysis of the intersection of contractarian approaches with the findings and assumptions of the field of moral psychology. Finally, the managerial utility of social contract based approaches needs to be explored with emphasis on identifying “translator” concepts. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on care homes in the United Kingdom, particularly for those residents living with dementia. The impetus for this article comes from a recent review conducted by the authors. That review, a qualitative media analysis of news and academic articles published during the first few months of the outbreak, identified ethical care as a key theme warranting further investigation within the context of the crisis. To explore ethical care further, a set of salient (...) ethical values for delivering care to care home residents living with dementia during the pandemic was derived from a synthesis of relevant ethical standards, codes and philosophical approaches. The ethical values identified were caring, non-maleficence, beneficence, procedural justice, dignity in death and dying, well-being, safety, and personhood. Using these ethical values as a framework, alongside examples from contemporaneous media and academic sources, this article discusses the delivery of ethical care to care home residents with dementia within the context of COVID-19. The analysis identifies positive examples of ethical values displayed by care home staff, care sector organisations, healthcare professionals and third sector advocacy organisations. However, concerns relating to the death rates, dignity, safety, well-being and personhood – of residents and staff – are also evident. These shortcomings are attributable to negligent government strategy, which resulted in delayed guidance, lack of resources and Personal Protective Equipment, unclear data, and inconsistent testing. Consequently, this review demonstrates the ways in which care homes are underfunded, under resourced and undervalued. (shrink)

The primary aim of this essay is to present a case for a heavily revised notion of heterophenomenology. l will refer to the revised notion as ‘enkinaesthesia’ because of its dependence on the experiential entanglement of our own and the other’s felt action as the sensory background within which all other experience is possible. Enkinaesthesia2 emphasizes two things: (i) the neuromuscular dynamics of the agent, including the givenness and ownership of its experience, and (ii) the entwined, blended and situated co-affective (...) feeling of the presence of the other(s), agential (for example, human, horse, cat, beetle) and non-agential (for example, cup, bed, apple, paper) and, where appropriate, the anticipated arc of the other’s action or movement, including, again where appropriate, the other’s intentionality. When the ‘other’ is also a sensing and experiencing agent it is their - in this case, the pair’s - affective intentional reciprocity, their folding, enfolding, and unfolding, which co-constitutes the conscious relation and the experientially recursive temporal dynamics that lead to the formation and maintenance of the deep integral enkinaesthetic structures and melodies which bind us together, even when they pull us apart. Such deeply felt enkinaesthetic melodies emphasise the dialogical nature of the backgrounded feeling of being. (shrink)

Introduction: Thinking, writing, and reading about the real -- Dialectic and the real : Lacan, Hegel, and the alchemy of après-coup -- 'Reality' and the real : culture as anamorphosis -- The real of sexual difference : imagining, thinking, being -- Ethics and the real : the ungodly virtues of psychoanalysis -- Politics, or, the art of the impossible.

This paper examines two issues about professionalism and business that appear at first blush to be entirely separate. The first is the question of who counts as a “professional,” and whether, in particular, business people are “professionals.” The second issue is howacknowledged professionals that regularly interact with business, such as accountants, lawyers, and physicians, can find the moral free space necessary to maintain professional integrity in the face of financial pressures. Conflicts of interest for professionals working incorporations recur with disturbing (...) regularity, and often have serious consequences. In the end I will show how both issues share a common solution. The solution involves understanding the normative function of the manager in the modern corporation, a function, I will argue, made more conspicuous by work over the last two decades done in the areas of stakeholder theory, corporate social performance (CSP), and social contract theory. The remainder of the paper is devoted to articulating these two problems and clarifying their common solution. (shrink)

PURPLE (RED-and-BLUE) is the most frequently occurring derived (binary) basic color term (BCT), but there is never a named composite BCT meaning RED-or-BLUE. GREEN-or-BLUE is the most frequently named composite color category, but there is never a BCT for the corresponding derived (binary) category CYAN (BLUE-and-GREEN). Why?

Prior to European influence, predation by Native Americans was the major factor limiting the numbers and distribution of ungulates in the Intermountain West. This hypothesis is based on analyses of (1) the efficiency of Native American predation, including cooperative hunting, use of dogs, food storage, use of nonungulate foods, and hunting methods; (2) optimal-foraging studies; (3) tribal territory boundary zones as prey reservoirs; (4) species ratios, and sex and age of aboriginal ungulate kills; (5) impact of European diseases on aboriginal (...) populations; and (6) synergism between aboriginal and carnivore predation. Native Americans had no effective conservation practices, and the manner in which they harvested ungulates was the exact opposite of any predicted conservation strategy. Native Americans acted in ways that maximized their individual fitness regardless of the impact on the environment. For humans, conservation is seldom an evolutionarily stable strategy. By limiting ungulate numbers and purposefully modifying the vegetation with fire, Native Americans structured entire plant and animal communities. Because ecosystems with native peoples are entirely different than those lacking aboriginal populations, a “hands-off” or “natural regulation” approach by today’s land managers will not duplicate the ecological conditions under which those ecosystems developed. The modern concept of wilderness as areas without human influence is a myth. North America was not a “wilderness” waiting to be discovered, instead it was home to tens of millions of aboriginal peoples before European-introduced diseases decimated their numbers. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Discussion of real cases encountered by medical students has been advocated as a component of medical ethics education. Suggested benefits include: a focus on the actual problems that medical students confront; active learner involvement; and facilitation of an exploration of the meaning of their own values in relation to professional behaviour. However, the approach may also carry risks: students may focus too narrowly on particular clinical topics or show a preference for discussing legal problems that may appear to have clearer (...) solutions. Teaching may therefore omit areas generally considered to be important components of the curriculum. In this paper, the authors present an analysis of the moral problems raised by medical students in response to a request to describe ethically problematic cases they had encountered during two clinical attachments, for the purpose of educational discussion at case-based seminars. We discuss the problems raised and compare the content of the cases to the UK Consensus Statement on core content of learning. The authors also describe the approaches that the students used to undertake an initial analysis of the problems raised, and consider possible implications for the development of medical ethics education. (shrink)