OBJECTIVES: Life-sustaining treatment at the end of life gives rise to many ethical problems in Japan. Recent surveys of Japanese physicians suggested that they tend to treat terminally ill patients aggressively. We studied why Japanese physicians were reluctant to withhold or withdraw life-support from terminally ill patients and what affected their decisions. DESIGN AND PARTICIPANTS: A qualitative study design was employed, using a focus group interview with seven physicians, to gain an in-depth understanding of attitudes and rationales in Japan regarding (...) medical care at the end of life. RESULTS: Analysis revealed that physicians and patients' family members usually make decisions about life-sustaining treatment, while the patients' wishes are unavailable or not taken into account. Both physicians and family members tend to consider withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment as abandonment or even killing. The strongest reason to start cardiopulmonary resuscitation- and to continue it until patients' family members arrive-seems to be the family members' desire to be at the bedside at the time of death. All physicians participating in our study regarded advance directives that provide information as to patients' wishes about life-sustaining treatment desirable. All expressed concern, however, that it would be difficult to forego or discontinue life-support based on a patient's advance directive, particularly when the patient's family opposed the directive. CONCLUSION: Our group interview suggested several possible barriers to death with dignity and the appropriate use of advance directives in Japan. Further qualitative and quantitative research in this regard is needed. (shrink)

While it is acknowledged that there is a need for more qualitative research on suicide, it is also clear that the ethics of undertaking such research need to be addressed. This article uses the case study of the authors’ experience of gaining ethics approval for a research project that asks people what it is like to feel suicidal to (a) analyse the limits of confidentiality and anonymity and (b) consider the ways in which the process of ethics review can shape (...) and constrain suicide research. This leads to a discussion of the ways in which ethics committees assess and monitor qualitative research more generally and some preliminary suggestions for how this might be improved. (shrink)

The title of this book is somewhat misleading. A more apt title would have been, "A Marxist Critique of Husserl’s Nullification of the Real World." Such a title would have made the central argument and underlying concern in the present discussion more explicit. The author is intent on a spirited refutation of Husserl’s phenomenology as a transcendental, phenomenological idealism. It is particularly this stage of Husserl’s phenomenological development, maintains Sang-Ki Kim, that effects a sacrifice of the real world. The belated (...) return to the life-world, characteristic of Husserl’s later thought, does not, according to the author, help matters much. Husserl’s analysis of the life-world continues to be informed by the anti-historical apriorism that defined his earlier program of phenomenological idealism. Husserl’s concept of the life-world thus remains a bloodless abstraction, bereft of any acknowledgement of the concrete, historical, naturalist-materialist basis that undergirds it. (shrink)

The philosophical press, in the United States as well as abroad, has not given the thought of the Polish philosopher, Roman Ingarden, the recognition that it rightly deserves. It is because of this state of affairs that Volume IV of Analecta Husserliana comes to us as a scholarly contribution in a time of need. The singular merit of this volume is that it not only makes available some noteworthy critical and constructive analyses by Ingarden but also offers a series of (...) systematic studies of various facets of Ingarden’s philosophy by his chief interpreters and critics. The first selection in Volume IV is part of the Oslo Lectures, given by Ingarden in 1967, and here made public for the first time in its original German transcription. In these very important lectures Ingarden distills the results of his many years of critical reflection on the possibilities and limits of Husserl’s program of phenomenological research. The general topic of these lectures is: "The Problem of Husserlian Reduction". However, as the discussion proceeds it is not only problems attendant to the celebrated reduction that come under critical review but indeed the whole gamut of Husserlian motifs from intentionality to inter-subjectivity. (shrink)

Bioethics is the study of ethical issues arising out of advances in the life sciences and medicine. Historically, bioethics has been associated with issues in research ethics and clinical ethics as a result of research scandals such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and public debates about the definition of death, medical paternalism, health care rationing, and abortion. As biomedical technologies have advanced, challenging new questions have arisen for bioethics and new sub-disciplines such as neuroethics and public health ethics have entered (...) the scene. This volume features ten original essays on five cutting-edge controversies in bioethics written by leading philosophers. I. Research Ethics: How Should We Justify Ancillary Care Duties? II. Clinical Ethics: Are Psychopaths Morally Accountable? III. Reproductive Ethics: Is There A Solution to the Non-Identity Problem? IV. Neuroethics: What is Addiction and Does It Excuse? V. Public Health Ethics: Is Luck Egalitarianism Implausibly Harsh? S. Matthew Liao and Collin O’Neil’s concise introduction to the essays in the volume, the annotated bibliographies and study questions for each controversy, and the supplemental guide to additional current controversies in bioethics give the reader a broad grasp of the different kinds of challenges in bioethics. (shrink)

One of the guaranteed state-controlled rights is the right to education. In independent Ukraine, the right to choose an educational institution, depending on the parents' financial capacities, their vision of the child's future employment and his or her abilities, is legally justified. The content of education, in addition to the compulsory, standardized component to be provided by public schools, includes the optional optional component. As an educational subject to teach students proper behavior, from September 1, grades 5-6 have introduced the (...) compulsory non-religious subject Ethics, much of which is covered by secular etiquette. (shrink)

Liberalizm i svoboda -- Restrikt︠s︡ionizm i ogranichenie -- Liberal-restrikt︠s︡ionizm i garmonicheskai︠a︡ t︠s︡ivilizat︠s︡ii︠a︡.

The objectives of this study were to develop a high-density chromosome bin map of homoeologous group 7 in hexaploid wheat, to identify gene distribution in these chromosomes, and to perform comparative studies of wheat with rice and barley. We mapped 2148 loci from 919 EST clones onto group 7 chromosomes of wheat. In the majority of cases the numbers of loci were significantly lower in the centromeric regions and tended to increase in the distal regions. The level of duplicated loci (...) in this group was 24% with most of these loci being localized toward the distal regions. One hundred nineteen EST probes that hybridized to three fragments and mapped to the three group 7 chromosomes were designated landmark probes and were used to construct a consensus homoeologous group 7 map. An additional 49 probes that mapped to 7AS, 7DS, and the ancestral translocated segment involving 7BS also were designated landmarks. Landmark probe orders and comparative maps of wheat, rice, and barley were produced on the basis of corresponding rice BAC/PAC and genetic markers that mapped on chromosomes 6 and 8 of rice. Identification of landmark ESTs and development of consensus maps may provide a framework of conserved coding regions predating the evolution of wheat genomes. (shrink)

A new class of program-oriented logical formalisms is investigated – renominative logics with extended renominations, equality predicates, and predicate complement composition. Composition algebras and languages of such logics are described; their semantic properties are investigated. For these logics, a number of logical consequence relations are proposed and investigated, in particular, the logical consequence relations with undefinedness conditions. Properties of these relations form the semantic basis for further construction of sequent-type calculi for the proposed logics.