In the West, mainstream bioethicists tend to appreciate intimate relationships as a hindrance to individual autonomy. Scholars have even argued against approaching a mother to donate a kidney to save the life of her child; the request, they claim, is too manipulative and, thereby, violates her autonomy. For Chinese bioethicists, such a moral analysis is absurd. The intimate relationship between mother and child establishes strong mutual obligations. It creates mutual moral responsibilities that often require sacrifices for each other. This paper (...) argues that while aiding others is a moral duty, helping one’s family is a much stronger duty and poses no threat to one’s autonomy. For Confucianism, empathetic intimate feelings, the heart and mind of ren, rest at the root of morality. It requires that we, as moral beings, assume duties to relieve the suffering of others. The more intimate the relationship the stronger the obligation to assist. The family is a closely knitted moral community. Family members often share living resources, mutual experiences, and a sense of identity. Family members act as a social unit, and, ordinarily, mutual obligations among members have priority over duties to those outside of the family. For Confucian bioethics, family-based consent to medical treatment is regarded as natural and reasonable. Family-based decision making is a taken-for-granted norm of social life. While close family members have priority, Confucianism extends such obligations outward toward members of the extended family and the society at large. There is a general principle of gradation of love, which reflects different degrees of personal intimacy and, therefore, of moral obligation. In this fashion, Confucianism seeks to treat the whole of society as one extended family. Hence, in bioethics, mutual responsibility and family-based consent are regarded as basic principles. Through a series of case discussions, this paper illustrates that atomistic individual-based autonomy offers but a poor response to bioethical issues. (shrink)

Our conversation stems from a collaborative, fieldwork-based project on Chinese Islam, and on Chinese Muslim women’s rights, within a secular political ideology and legislative rights framework. Dialogue was a defining feature throughout the years of field investigation and research, fusing autobiographical and cultural trajectories in what the anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup calls the ‘betweenness’ of intersubjectively created experience and knowledge. The premise for our conversation lies in the claim that insufficient attention has been paid to developments, which suggest alternatives to the (...) near-axiomatic ethnographic relationship of outside researcher and native informant. In foregrounding the cross-cultural relationship between two researchers, we explore how in the course of fieldwork interaction, boundaries of self and familiar ‘standpoints’ are redrawn. We ask how the history of this collaborative relationship across cultures might question and redefine the classic ethnographic binary of inside and outside, the centre and the margin, the universal and the particular, the ‘western feminist’ and ‘other women’. (shrink)

The controversy concerning the identity of thinking and being has been under way for several months. The truth is bound to become more clear when it is debated further. Our understanding of this problem has also been enhanced through discussion, and this discussion has all the more demonstrated its important significance. It will become very evident that this is by no means a problem of the individual term, which Engels used in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, (...) but also a problem concerning the basic principles of Marxist philosophy; nor is it merely an abstract theoretical problem, but rather a problem of great realistic significance. (shrink)

本书在结合“中庸”思想理念,从修养自身和交往处世两个大方面,将其中的有现实意义的部分用现代人的眼光重新阐释。.

Studies of style can be approached from two directions: the end and the means. From the end point of view, a style is a cluster of features present in artifacts; scholars usually classify the features in products to differentiate styles. Similar approaches used to examine features for further exploring the nature of style, the degree between styles, and the systematic measurement within style were extensively covered in Chap. 3. From the means point of view, a style is a mode by (...) which designers’ personal and professional preferences are expressed, and studies attempt to deliberate the mode of expression to mark styles. Although most style researchers have studied both directions, their efforts cannot provide clear explanations of how a style is generated. That is because not enough research has been devoted to the study of the means used that create a style. This chapter begins to explore, through a case study, the aspects of style creation and the forces that generate a style. Studies of style approached from the means point of view conducted in various fields and the factors determining the generation of style are reviewed first. (shrink)

This article introduces the notion of duplex elements of the finite rings and corresponding neutrosophic rings. The authors establish duplex ring Dup(R) and neutrosophic duplex ring Dup(R)I)) by way of various illustrations. The tables of different duplicities are constructed to reveal the comparison between rings Dup(Zn), Dup(Dup(Zn)) and Dup(Dup(Dup(Zn ))) for the cyclic ring Zn . The proposed duplicity structures have several algebraic systems with dissimilar consequences. Author’s characterize finite rings with R + R is different from the duplex ring (...) Dup(R). However, this characterization supports that R + R = Dup(R) for some well known rings, namely zero rings and finite fields. (shrink)

Can God create an unliftable stone? Beall & Cotnoir propose that ‘God can create an unliftable stone’ is a truth-value gap (neither true nor false). However, this yields a revenge paradox on whether God can eschew gaps. Can God avoid gappy ascriptions of power? Either way, God’s power seems to have limits. In response, it may be said that ascribing God the power to avoid gaps is itself gappy—it concerns a power that God neither has nor lacks. Yet this ends (...) up being inconsistent, for it implies that God definitely lacks that power. Following Aquinas, perhaps Beall & Cotnoir could accept this lack and still uphold omnipotence, suggesting that the power to avoid gaps is impossible for God. Yet the Aquinian stratagem is enough to block the original paradox, which saps the motivation to proffer truth-value gaps in addition. I conclude that the gappy solution is either inadequate or insufficiently motivated. (shrink)

This paper begins with a problem stemming from Hume regarding credences about credences. Suppose one has a credence of .95 in p, and suppose one assesses the credence to be such. But suppose one’s second-order credence in this assessment is less than 1. Then, by a standard conditionalization rule, one’s credence in p becomes less than .95. Moreover, such “erosion” can iterate by considering one’s, third-, fourth-, fifth-order credences, etc. (In light of this, some have rejected higher-order credences; however, it (...) is argued that Lewis’ “Principal Principle” forbids this.) The paper then offers a partial solution by describing circumstances under which a person has reason to assign credence 1 to a first-order credence. The solution takes the form of a “transparency” view of self-knowledge from Parent (2017, chapter 8). Briefly, it is argued that when one “reflex-like” utters a sentence “The probability of p is n”, then as a matter of psychological law, the utterance is an expression of one’s own judgment. The Principal Principle then necessitates that one’s credence in p is n, assuming one is being rational. Thus, upon perceiving such an utterance, one can thereby have a reason to assign a second-order credence of 1. (shrink)

T. A. Cavanaugh defends double-effect reasoning (DER), also known as the principle of double effect. DER plays a role in anti-consequentialist ethics (such as deontology), in hard cases in which one cannot realize a good without also causing a foreseen, but not intended, bad effect (for example, killing non-combatants when bombing a military target). This study is the first book-length account of the history and issues surrounding this controversial approach to hard cases. It will be indispensable in theoretical ethics, applied (...) ethics (especially medical and military), and moral theology. It will also interest legal and public policy scholars. (shrink)

This article reports the results of marketing research that was undertaken as part of an information technology prototype development project. The project was devoted to the creation of a multimedia-based prototype system to provide timely and accurate information from government geographic information databases to government decision makers and the general public in an easy-to-use interactive visual format. The general public (i.e., private citizens, schools, and businesses—society in general) had to be able to access the product via broadband-to-the-home (-business/-school) technology. Because (...) of significant time and budget constraints, a satisficing approach to the marketing research was adopted. This approach led to the definition of several social categories of the general public whose opinions were thought to be critical to the commercial development of the prototype: (a) elementary and secondary education leaders (both technophiles and technophobes), (b) adults with a record as early adopters of information technologies, (c) adults with no previous interest in (or limited experience with) information technologies, and (d) high school students. Six focus groups were defined based on these social categories. The results of the marketing research devoted to information needs of the focus group participants are reported, and implications related to their expectations regarding emerging technologies are discussed. The research suggests that expectations in the portion of the market on which the success of the technologies depend are often inconsistent with the types of technologies that are being developed for that market. (shrink)

Ethics and school business officials -- Making ethical decisions -- Ethics for school business officials -- Examining personal and professional codes of ethics -- Approaching ethical dilemmas -- Human resource management -- Financial resource management -- Facility, property, and information management -- Ancillary services : transportation.