This article examines the impact of traditional Chinese culture on organ donation from the perspective of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. In each of these cultural systems, it appears that there are some particular sayings or remarks that are often taken in modern Chinese society to be contrary to organ donation, especially cadaveric organ donation. However, this article argues that the central concerns of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism are “great love,” “ren,” and “dao,” which can be reasonably interpreted to support organ (...) donation. The author understands that each cultural system, in order to play its cultural function, must have its central concerns as well as relevant ritual practices (li) that incarnate its religious and ethical commitments. That is, each plays a general cultural role, which influences organ donation in particular not merely through abstract or general ethical principles and teachings, but through a combination of ethical teachings and the forming of particular ritual practices. This article contends that the primary reason Chinese individuals fail to donate sufficient cadaveric organs for transplantation is not because particular remarks or sayings from each of these systems appear to conflict with donation. Neither is it that the central concerns of these systems cannot support cadaveric donation. Rather, it is that modern Chinese individuals have failed to develop and secure relevant ritual practices that support the central concerns of organ transplantation. The article concludes that in order to promote more donations, there is a need to form relevant ritual practices supporting organ donation in conformity with the central concerns of these cultural systems. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Daodejing is an ancient Chinese text traditionally taken as a representative Daoist classic expressing a distinctive philosophy from the Warring States Period . This essay explicates the ethical dimensions of the DDJ paying attention to issues related to war and peace. The discussion consists of four parts: “naturalness” as an onto‐cosmological argument for a philosophy of harmony, balance, and peace; war as a sign of the disruption of the natural pattern of things initiated by the proliferation of desire; defensive (...) war and appropriate war conduct required when one has to be involved in warfare; and the natural and spontaneous way of living that would prevent war from happening in the first place. This essay attempts to show that what makes the DDJ different from other military texts, or what is called the “art of war corpus” in China is that the discourse of war and warfare in the DDJ is presented via its unique understanding of peace at the personal and social levels. The DDJ is meant to be an inquiry into an effective method to prevent war from happening amid a world full of selfish interests and excessive desires. It proposes that peace is not only a condition in which there is freedom from war and overt violence, but a state of harmony that marks human life and its betterment. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Accepting the claim that the living have some moral duties with regard to dead bodies, this paper explores those duties and how they bear on the popular travelling exhibition Bodyworlds. I argue that the concept of informed consent presupposes substantial duties to the dead, namely duties that reckon with the meaning of the act in question. An attitude of respect and not regarding human remains as mere raw material are non‐alienable substantial duties. I found the ethos of Bodyworlds premature (...) but full of promises such as public attitudes to organ donations. At the practical level I conclude that Bodyworlds should use only willed donations or unclaimed bodies for which dignified funerals are not available. In the case of live donations, Bodyworlds has a duty to participate in the medical care of needy donors. However, secrecy with regard to the sources of cadavers seems to be the most troublesome aspect of Bodyworlds. (shrink)

:This article examines the concept of moral enhancement from two different perspectives. The first is a bottom-up approach, which aims at identifying fundamental moral traits and subcapacities as targets for enhancement. The second perspective, a top-down approach, is holistic and in line with virtue ethics. Both perspectives lead to the observation that alterations of material and social conditions are the most reliable means to improve prosocial behavior overall.Moral enhancement as a preventive measure invokes Gnostic narratives on the allegedly fallen status (...) of human nature, its search for salvation, and the dependence of the laity on heteronomous salvific interventions. The allure of the preventive kind of enhancement is attributable to its religious hues.Owing to the absence of clarity regarding moral enhancement and of metrics to evaluate its progress, humanity is at risk of prioritizing unclear and unsubstantiated measures of preventive diminishment at the expense of celebrating human capacities and joys. (shrink)

Originally published 1961. Translation of "Meditaciones del Quijote :Meditacion preliminar. Meditacion primera." (1914). Contents: Reader...; Preliminary Meditation; First Meditation (Brief Treatise on the Novel).

Causal independence of the simultaneous positions and momenta of two distinguishable particles in nonrelativistic physics and causal independence of events in two relatively spacelike regions of space-time in relativity are analyzed and discussed. This review paper formulates causal independence in a general and operational way and summarizes the inferences drawn from it in non-relativistic quantum mechanics, classical relativistic point mechanics, quantum field theory, and classical field theory. Special attention is given to the open question of the relationship between local independence (...) and commutativity in quantum field theory. (shrink)

Discussion of a short text on ethics, originally Greek, translated into Arabic and Hebrew, and adopted by some Christians, Muslims and Jews for guiding their lives.

Much progress has been made in the Soviet Union and a number of other socialist countries in studying and advancing the heritage of Marx and Engels in esthetics. The enrichment of our notions of the views of the founders of Marxism with respect to esthetics and literary criticism has promoted the further development of the discipline of esthetics. The progress achieved is the result and continuation of the work done by the older generation of Soviet philosophers, critics, and students of (...) literature fully thirty and thirty-five years ago in studying and elaborating the heritage of Marx and Engels. (shrink)

An explicit expression of the “Wigner operator” is derived, such that the Wigner function of a quantum state is equal to the expectation value of this operator with respect to the same state. This Wigner operator leads to a representation-independent procedure for establishing the correspondence between the inhomogeneous symplectic group applicable to linear canonical transformations in classical mechanics and the Weyl-metaplectic group governing the symmetry of unitary transformations in quantum mechanics.

Sa‘d ibn Mansūr Ibn Kammūna was a Jewish physician-philosopher of Iraqi origin who flourished in the thirteenth century. Best known for his original and comparative inquiry into the three monotheistic faiths, whose publication nearly cost him his life, he was, in fact, a very productive thinker, and a scholar well in tune with developments in the philosophy and science of his day. He had personal contact with some leading intellectuals, and he played an important role in the diffusion of some (...) new trends of thought. His legacy, in the form of commentaries, correspondence, and original works, is now being studied in earnest. (shrink)

In Norway, by tradition a Lutheran country, the puritan ethics of a moral minority has a strong influence on the development and manifestations of medical ethics. Those who exert this influence are found primarily among politicians, the clergy, and, last but certainly not least, among nurses and doctors. The focus of interest is not so much on problems of bioethical moral theory or the teaching of bioethics to students, but very much on attitudes and policies with regard to substantive issues (...) traditionally regarded in Norway as burning bioethical issues, such as: medical research ethics, abortion, prenatal diagnosis, euthanasia, definitions of death, and reproductive technologies. (shrink)

By analyzing a gedanken experiment designed to measure the distance l between two spatially separated points, we find that this distance cannot be measured with uncertainty less than (ll 2 P) 1/3 , considerably larger than the Planck scale lP (or the string scale in string theories), the conventional-wisdom uncertainty in distance measurements. This limitation to space-time measurements is interpreted as resulting from quantum fluctuations of space-time itself. Thus, at very short distance scales, space-time is “foamy.” This intrinsic foaminess of (...) space-time provides another source of noise in the interferometers. The LIGO/VIRGO and LISA generations of gravity-wave interferometers, through future refinements, are expected to reach displacement noise levels low enough to test our proposed degree of foaminess in the structure of space-time. (shrink)

Inspired by Estelle Jorgensen’s book Values and Music Education (Indiana University Press, 2021), the author of this Book Review Essay, from a Scandinavian perspective, discusses the concept of value, the struggles of values, and the tension between universal values and relativism, as well as the fact that there is no such thing as a neutral position to speak from. Among thinkers and philosophers who have inspired these reflections are Charles Taylor, Chantal Mouffe, Simon Frith and Frede V. Nielsen.