There has been a great deal of philosophical discussion about using people, using people intentionally, using people as a means to some end, and using people merely as a means to some end. In this paper, I defend the following claim about using people: NOT ALWAYS WRONG: using people—even merely as a means—is not always morally objectionable. Having defended that claim, I suggest that the following claim is also correct: NO ONE FEATURE: when it is morally objectionable to use people, (...) this is for many different kinds of reasons—there is no one wrong-making feature that every morally objectionable using has in common. After discussing these claims, I use them to present and motivate what I call the “precaution” theory of norms against using people. I conclude by considering a few cases from the criminal law context—cases that are naturally described as using people—to assess the moral appropriateness of this kind of use in these cases, and to demonstrate how the theory applies to the real world. (shrink)

OBJECTIVE: To describe the issues faced, and how they were addressed, by the University of Toronto Critical Care Medicine Program/Joint Centre for Bioethics Task Force on Appropriate Use of Life-Sustaining Treatment. The clinical problem addressed by the Task Force was dealing with requests by patients or substitute decision makers for life-sustaining treatment that their healthcare providers believe is inappropriate. DESIGN: Case study. SETTING: The University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics/Critical Care Medicine Program Task Force on Appropriate Use of Life-Sustaining (...) Treatment. PARTICIPANTS: The 24-member Task Force included physician and nursing leaders from five critical care units, bioethicists, a legal scholar, a health administration expert, a social worker, and a hospital public relations professional. INTERVENTIONS: None. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Our specific lessons learned include a) a policy focus on process; b) use of a negotiation and mediation model, rather than a hospital ethics committee model, for this process; and c) the policy development process is itself a negotiation, so we recommend equal involvement of interested groups including patients, families, and the public. CONCLUSIONS: This article describes the key issues faced by the Task Force while developing its policy. It will provide a useful starting point for other groups developing policy on appropriate use of life-sustaining treatment. (shrink)

Digital imaging has provided scientists with new opportunities to acquire and manipulate data using techniques that were difficult or impossible to employ in the past. Because digital images are easier to manipulate than film images, new problems have emerged. One growing concern in the scientific community is that digital images are not being handled with sufficient care. The problem is twofold: (1) the very small, yet troubling, number of intentional falsifications that have been identified, and (2) the more common unintentional, (...) inappropriate manipulation of images for publication. Journals and professional societies have begun to address the issue with specific digital imaging guidelines. Unfortunately, the guidelines provided often do not come with instructions to explain their importance. Thus they deal with what should or should not be done, but not the associated ‘why’ that is required for understanding the rules. This article proposes 12 guidelines for scientific digital image manipulation and discusses the technical reasons behind these guidelines. These guidelines can be incorporated into lab meetings and graduate student training in order to provoke discussion and begin to bring an end to the culture of data beautification. (shrink)

Modifying images for scientific publication is now quick and easy due to changes in technology. This has created a need for new image processing guidelines and attitudes, such as those offered to the research community by Doug Cromey (Cromey 2010). We suggest that related changes in technology have simplified the task of detecting misconduct for journal editors as well as researchers, and that this simplification has caused a shift in the responsibility for reporting misconduct. We also argue that the concept (...) of best practices in image processing can serve as a general model for education in best practices in research. (shrink)

Appropriation art involves the use of pre-existing works of art with little to no transformation. Works of AA fail to satisfy established criteria for originality, such as creative labour and transformative use. As such, appropriation artists are often subject to copyright lawsuits and defend their work under the fair use doctrine of US copyright law. In legal cases regarding AA and fair use, judges lack a general principle whereby they can determine whether or not the offending party has ‘transformed’ the (...) original work. Further, it is not the case that there is some antecedent fact that could determine the outcome one way or another. I diagnose debates surrounding the transformative nature of works of AA as cases of ‘metalinguistic negotiation’ over what concepts we should attach to terms like ‘copy’, ‘transformative’, and ‘work of art’. (shrink)

To describe leadership as ethical is largely a perceptional phenomenon informed by beliefs about what is normatively appropriate. Yet there is a remarkable scarcity in the leadership literature regarding how to define what is "normatively appropriate." To shed light on this issue, we draw upon Relational Models Theory (Fiske, 1992, Psychol Rev, 99:689-723), which differentiates between four types of relationships: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. We describe how each of these relationship models dictates a distinct set (...) of normatively appropriate behaviors. We argue that perceptions of unethical leadership behavior result from one of three situations: (a) a mismatch between leader's and follower's relational models, (b) a different understanding about the behavioral expression, or preos, of the same relational model, or (c) a violation of a previously agreed upon relational model. Further, we argue that the type of relational model mismatch impacts the perceived severity of a transgression. Finally, we discuss the implications of our model with regard to understanding, managing, and regulating ethical leadership failures. (shrink)

Concluding remarks for the special issue of Approaching Religion, ‘Appropriation as a Perspective and Topic in the Study of Religion and Spirituality’.

The Human Tissue Act 2004 presents a radical change to the legal regulation of the use of human material in England and Wales. The Act presents a broad regulatory framework but much in the practical operation of the legislation will depend upon regulations to be enacted and a new Code of Practice. This article examines 'appropriate consent' for the use of human tissue for research purposes in the context of the living competent adult. It examines the provision of information as (...) part of the consent process for the use of human materials for research purposes, the question of when consent can be withdrawn, and the controversial exception enabling the use without consent of anonymized material for research purposes where the research has been ethically approved. The paper concludes by highlighting some of the problems which may remain after the legislation comes into force. (shrink)

When do probability distribution functions (PDFs) about future climate misrepresent uncertainty? How can we recognise when such misrepresentation occurs and thus avoid it in reasoning about or communicating our uncertainty? And when we should not use a PDF, what should we do instead? In this paper we address these three questions. We start by providing a classification of types of uncertainty and using this classification to illustrate when PDFs misrepresent our uncertainty in a way that may adversely affect decisions. We (...) then discuss when it is reasonable and appropriate to use a PDF to reason about or communicate uncertainty about climate. We consider two perspectives on this issue. On one, which we argue is preferable, available theory and evidence in climate science basically excludes using PDFs to represent our uncertainty. On the other, PDFs can legitimately be provided when resting on appropriate expert judgement and recognition of associated risks. Once we have specified the border between appropriate and inappropriate uses of PDFs, we explore alternatives to their use. We briefly describe two formal alternatives, namely imprecise probabilities and possibilistic distribution functions, as well as informal possibilistic alternatives. We suggest that the possibilistic alternatives are preferable. -/- . (shrink)

Self-plagiarism requires clear definition within an environment that places integrity at the heart of the research enterprise. This paper explores the whole notion of self-plagiarism by academics and distinguishes between appropriate and inappropriate textual re-use in academic publications, while considering research on other forms of plagiarism such as student plagiarism. Based on the practical experience of the authors in identifying academics’ self-plagiarism using both electronic detection and manual analysis, a simple model is proposed for identifying self-plagiarism by academics.

In this paper we explore the intersection of three topics which have historically been singled out for ethical consideration in advertising and marketing: the use of fear appeals, marketing to the elderly, and the marketing of health care services and products. Issues relevant to using fear appeals in promoting health care issues to the elderly are explored with a consumer psychologist's theoretical view of fear appeals. Next the assumption of the elderly market's vulnerability and indicants of social or psychological function (...) which would differentiate the elderly recipients of marketing communications are examined both in terms of function and ethical concerns.Overall, our review of the theoretical underpinnings of fear-based communication and the psychological characteristics does not indicate that the elderly of today are particularlyvulnerable. While the elderly are probably somewhat more dogmatic than younger consumers and perhaps view outcomes from the perspective of their age, there are no indications that their psychological responses to fear-based appeals differ significantly from those of younger consumers. (shrink)

Purpose Existing algorithms for predicting suicide risk rely solely on data from electronic health records, but such models could be improved through the incorporation of publicly available socioeconomic data – such as financial, legal, life event and sociodemographic data. The purpose of this study is to understand the complex ethical and privacy implications of incorporating sociodemographic data within the health context. This paper presents results from a survey exploring what the general public’s knowledge and concerns are about such publicly available (...) data and the appropriateness of using it in suicide risk prediction algorithms. Design/methodology/approach A survey was developed to measure public opinion about privacy concerns with using socioeconomic data across different contexts. This paper presented respondents with multiple vignettes that described scenarios situated in medical, private business and social media contexts, and asked participants to rate their level of concern over the context and what factor contributed most to their level of concern. Specific to suicide prediction, this paper presented respondents with various data attributes that could potentially be used in the context of a suicide risk algorithm and asked participants to rate how concerned they would be if each attribute was used for this purpose. Findings The authors found considerable concern across the various contexts represented in their vignettes, with greatest concern in vignettes that focused on the use of personal information within the medical context. Specific to the question of incorporating socioeconomic data within suicide risk prediction models, the results of this study show a clear concern from all participants in data attributes related to income, crime and court records, and assets. Data about one’s household were also particularly concerns for the respondents, suggesting that even if one might be comfortable with their own being used for risk modeling, data about other household members is more problematic. Originality/value Previous studies on the privacy concerns that arise when integrating data pertaining to various contexts of people’s lives into algorithmic and related computational models have approached these questions from individual contexts. This study differs in that it captured the variation in privacy concerns across multiple contexts. Also, this study specifically assessed the ethical concerns related to a suicide prediction model and determining people’s awareness of the publicness of select data attributes, as well as which of these data attributes generated the most concern in such a context. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to pursue this question. (shrink)

Objective To find whether Western guidelines on breaking bad news in a nonemergency department are appropriate for an emergency department of a non-Western country; according to patients’ preferences. Method We designed a 19 items questionnaire of Likert-type scale and interviewed 156 patients in the emergency department of a referral hospital in Iran. Results The patients’ preferences in 9 out of 19 statements were similar to the guidelines. “Using the maternal language” received the strongest agreement. The strongest disagreement was on “encouraging (...) the patients to talk after receiving bad news.” The summative scores of subsection indicated strong agreement for cultural issues, followed by communication skills, breaking bad news session, and privacy. Conclusion The patients’ preferences were not completely consistent with the guidelines. We could not determine if it was a situational or cultural issue. However, it is reasonable to design a new guideline for breaking bad news, considering these factors. (shrink)

The primary goal of the peer review of research grant proposals is to evaluate their quality for the funding agency. An important secondary goal is to provide constructive feedback to applicants for their resubmissions. However, little is known about whether review feedback achieves this goal. In this paper, we present a multi-methods analysis of responses from grant applicants regarding their perceptions of the effectiveness and appropriateness of peer review feedback they received from grant submissions. Overall, 56–60% of applicants determined the (...) feedback to be appropriate, although their judgments were more favorable if their recent application was funded. Importantly, independent of funding success, women found the feedback better written than men, and more white applicants found the feedback to be fair than non-white applicants. Also, perceptions of a variety of biases were specifically reported in respondents’ feedback. Less than 40% of applicants found the feedback to be very useful in informing their research and improving grantsmanship and future submissions. Further, negative perceptions of the appropriateness of review feedback were positively correlated with more negative perceptions of feedback usefulness. Importantly, respondents suggested that highly competitive funding pay-lines and poor inter-panel reliability limited the usefulness of review feedback. Overall, these results suggest that more effort is needed to ensure that appropriate and useful feedback is provided to all applicants, bolstering the equity of the review process and likely improving the quality of resubmitted proposals. (shrink)

Removing the Commons defends a Lockean Left-Libertarian account of the moral conditions in which people may remove, either via use or appropriation, natural resources from the commons. I conclude that self-owning agents may remove natural resources from the commons just so long as they leave others the competitive value of their removal in a way that best affords others an equal opportunity for welfare.

Prior used our emotions to argue that tensed language cannot be translated by tenseless language. However, it is widely accepted that Mellor and MacBeath have shown that our emotions do not imply the existence of tensed facts. I criticise this orthodoxy. There is a natural and plausible view of the appropriateness of emotions which in combination with Prior’s argument implies the existence of tensed facts. The Mellor/MacBeath position does nothing to upset this natural view and therefore is not sufficient to (...) block one drawing conclusions for the metaphysics of time from the nature of our emotions. (shrink)

Teaching bioethics with visual education tools, such as movies and comics, is a unique way of explaining the history and progress of human research and the art and science of medicine to high school students. For more than a decade, bioethical concepts have appeared in movies, and these films are useful for teaching medical and research ethics in high schools. Using visual tools to teach bioethics can have both interpretational and transformational effects on learners that will enhance their overall understanding (...) of complex moral and legal issues in medicine and research.High school students are uniquely suited to learn bioethics because they will soon become legal adults. As adults, they will make moral decisions that may affect their health and wellbeing as well as that of their communities and societies.However, not all visual education tools are appropriate for bioethics pedagogy in high school. Bioethics film and comic producers must consider the specifics of student age, race, gender, belief, level of education, and sexual orientation. Such tools must not be dominated by either dystopic or utopic genres, must aim for objectivity, and must consider the complexity of ethical decision making. It is critical that the teacher, who is the final arbiter regarding the use of visual tools in the classroom, determines that the visual learning tool is acceptable for students in any particular education context. In addition, during the conceptualization and creation of these tools, bioethics film and comic producers must work harder to ensure that these visual tools are devoid of any form of stereotyping. (shrink)

We argue that in the decision making process required for selecting assertible vague descriptions of an object, it is practical that communicating agents adopt an epistemic stance. This corresponds to the assumption that there exists a set of conventions governing the appropriate use of labels, and about which an agent has only partial knowledge and hence significant uncertainty. It is then proposed that this uncertainty is quantified by a measure corresponding to an agent’s subjective belief that a vague concept label (...) can be appropriately used to describe a particular object. We then apply Bayesian networks to investigate, in the case when knowledge of labelling conventions is represented by an ordering or ranking of the labels according to their appropriateness, how measure values allocated to basic labels can be used to directly infer the appropriateness measure of compound expressions. (shrink)

We argue that in the decision making process required for selecting assertible vague descriptions of an object, it is practical that communicating agents adopt an epistemic stance. This corresponds to the assumption that there exists a set of conventions governing the appropriate use of labels, and about which an agent has only partial knowledge and hence significant uncertainty. It is then proposed that this uncertainty is quantified by a measure corresponding to an agent’s subjective belief that a vague concept label (...) can be appropriately used to describe a particular object. We then apply Bayesian networks to investigate, in the case when knowledge of labelling conventions is represented by an ordering or ranking of the labels according to their appropriateness, how measure values allocated to basic labels can be used to directly infer the appropriateness measure of compound expressions. (shrink)

The problem of Galileo's logical methodology has long interested scholars. In this volume William A. Wallace offers a solution that is completely unexpected, yet backed by convincing documentary evidence. His analysis starts with an early notebook Galileo wrote at Pisa, appropriating a Jesuit professor's exposition of the Posterior Analystics of Aristotle, and ends with one of the last letters Galileo wrote, stating that in logic he has been a Peripatetic all his life. Wallace's detective work unearths the complete logic course (...) from which the notebook was excerpted, then proceeds to show how its terminology and methodology continue to surface in Galileo's later writings in which he founds his new sciences of the heavens and of local motion. The result is a tour de force that commends itself not only to Galileo's scholars and to logicians, philosophers, and historians, but to anyone interested in the epistemic roots of modern science. (shrink)

Within contemporary discussions on organizational wisdom, management scholars frequently turn to Aristotle’s work to conceptualize wisdom as phronesis, or practical wisdom. Contrary to the prevailing view, this paper argues that Aristotle did not propose an exclusively practical or particularistic conception of wisdom but, instead acknowledged that wisdom broadly conceived consists of two types of intellectual virtue: theoretical wisdom and practical wisdom. Aristotle’s ultimate position regarding the relations between sophia and phronesis has remained, however, ambiguous, giving rise to different interpretations, and, (...) more substantively, to the major appropriations of Aquinas, Heidegger and Gadamer. An analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of exemplary contributions to management wisdom suggests that research has predominantly applied Heideggerian and Gadamerian understandings of Aristotelian wisdom, while an Aquinian interpretation is largely absent in contemporary elaborations. Interpreting the Aristotelian notion of wisdom as dedicated purely to practical phronesis narrows the discussion on the nature of wisdom within an Aristotelian framework in ways that do not give full credit to the breadth and complexity of Aristotle’s thought. (shrink)

Issues of interest, identity and values intertwine in environmental conflicts, creating challenges that cannot generally be overcome using rationalities grounded in generalised argumentation and abstraction. To address the growing need to engage interests and identities along with plural values in the conservation of biodiversity and ecological systems, we introduce the concept of ‘appropriateness of actions’ and ground it in a relational understanding of environmental ethics. A determination of appropriateness for actions comes from combining outputs from value elicitation with those of (...) interest and identity negotiation in ways that are salient to specific people and their relationships to specific places. Drawing on the Blue Mountain Forest Partnership in the Pacific Northwest, we propose factors of success for supporting appropriate actions: 1) understanding context and identifying key stakeholders; 2) surfacing a diversity of interests and building system-level trust; 3) building empathy for different identities grounded in specific places; 4) eliciting diverse values and seeking to understand their links to worldviews and knowledge systems and; 5) seeking out appropriate actions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Appropriate Indecorum Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Political Theory of Jacques RancièreEthan StonemanJacques Rancière is one of France's leading intellectuals and a recent addition to the who's who of Continental philosophy. Since his time as a student at the Ecole normale supérieure, Rancière has generated a body of work that is at once wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and consistent. His arguments for a postfoundational and postliberal democratic understanding of politics have (...) influenced, echoed, or demanded critical response from such other Continental luminaries as Slavoj Žižek (1999, 2004) and Alain Badiou (2005). Much of this cachet is no doubt due to Rancière's central thesis regarding the sources, uses, and ends of politics. According to this argument, politics does not derive from putative a priori truths about knowledge, human nature, or social interaction; it is not a function of particular forms of government, and it neither establishes nor ensures socioeconomic order. Rather, for Rancière politics is a dissensual activity consisting solely in the demonstration of equality. But rather than designating something to be attained, preserved, or balanced against competing factors, Rancière's equality names an assumption that political subjects must presuppose on their own account and exhibit through their own actions. Insofar as a given social arrangement is hierarchical, the egalitarian presupposition will be necessarily agonistic and symbolically disruptive of that order. [End Page 129] In a word, Rancière champions a politics from the ground up, one that defends without patronizing the down-and-out, the disenfranchised, the unseen, and the unheard.During the last quarter of the twentieth century, while Rancière was formulating his theory of politics, American rhetoricians began to assert the continued relevance of decorum to the analysis of contemporary social phenomena (see, e.g., Fantham 1984; Leff 1987, 1990; Rosteck and Leff 1990; Hariman 1992, 1995; Smith 1992; Deem 1995). These efforts were concurrent with other attempts to foreground the aesthetic capacity of rhetoric to create, sustain, and transform perception via the symbolic manipulation of appearances (see, e.g., Farrell 1993; Whitson and Poulakos 1993; Vitanza 1997; Greene 1998). It is surprising, however, that these efforts to revitalize decorum and aesthetics have largely fail to reference recent Continental theories of aesthetics, many of which have tacit but unexplored bearing on decorum and rhetoric in general. Equally surprising is the tendency, within rhetorical studies, to discuss aesthetics without so much as broaching the subject of decorum. One exception to this trend is Robert Hariman (1992, 1995), who makes a convincing case for the conceptual intimacy between decorum and aesthetics. The classical theory of decorum, he argues, "blended significant aspects of rhetorical practice, social awareness, and political structure into an aesthetic sensibility that directed the selection of diction appropriate to one's subject or situation" (1992, 152). According to this account, decorum in the classical era engendered an aesthetic orientation toward one's sociopolitical environment and the rhetorical practices therein.I contend that Rancière's political theory makes significant strides toward bridging the gap between decorum, aesthetics, and politics while at the same time focusing attention on the role of equality and the empowering potential of indecorum. Although rhetoricians have tended not to address the inventional possibilities of indecorum per se, there has been a recurring effort among those writing on decorum to explicate the conditions of rhetorical performances of confrontation, nonadjustment, and resistance—performances that would eschew a logic of influence and assent for a tactics of opposition and disturbance. This trend has been accompanied by periodic attempts to account for rhetoric's potential to interrupt dominant modes of discourse and rationality and to identify its countervailing forces and formal constraints (Scott and Smith 1969; Windt 1972; Campbell 1973; Phillips 1996; Doxtader 2000). It is my contention that Rancière's political vocabulary can extend this line of inquiry by [End Page 130] expanding the possibility for indecorum to subvert the symbolic structures of oppression and domination while avoiding the pitfalls of adaptation and co-optation, that is, the reconstitution of decorum via dialectical syntheses of competing codes of conduct. Specifically, rhetoricians may interpret Rancière's political theory as answering Melissa Deem's... (shrink)

Ethical concerns about therapeutic misconception have been raised since the early 1980s. This concept was originally described as research participants' assumptions that decisions relating to research interventions are made on the basis of their individual therapeutic needs. The term has since been used to refer to a range of ‘misunderstandings’ that research participants may have. In this paper, we describe a new concept—therapeutic appropriation. Therapeutic appropriation occurs when patients, or clinicians, actively reframe research participation as an opportunity to enhance patients' (...) clinical care, while simultaneously acknowledging the generalised research aims. To illustrate the concept of therapeutic appropriation, we draw on data from an interview study which we conducted to investigate the experiences of patients and general practitioners involved in clinical trials in primary care. We argue that therapeutic appropriation has two key elements: comprehension that the research project is not necessarily aiming to benefit participants and the deliberate use of incidental features of the research for personal therapeutic benefit of various kinds. We conclude that therapeutic appropriation is a useful concept that refines understanding of potential ethical problems in clinical research, and points to strategies to address them. (shrink)

This chapter asks how moral shame and dread in Theravāda Buddhist philosophy compare with their appropriated use in contemporary Thai society. There has been a received view or an appropriated understanding of these concepts, warning against doing bad deeds. Moral shame and dread imply an irrational fear of doing something morally horrible in this contemporary usage. For example, one has an excessive fear of punishments in purgatory and believes it should be the sole morally appropriate reason for not (...) killing. However, how does this appropriated understanding differ from the original Buddhist understanding? This chapter argues that they differ in their philosophical assumptions: causalism and possibilism. Theravāda philosophy espouses causalism, the view that one should avoid bad deeds because of the doctrine of karma. On the other hand, the appropriated understanding implies possibilism, with a scrupulosity-based assumption that avoiding evil behaviors is motivated by the grip of unreasonable fear that doing them could result in irredeemable errors. I offer a new conception of meditative intentionality's power to solve this implied irrational fear problem. (shrink)

In the thesis literature review, an engineering graduate student is expected to place original research in the context of previous work by other researchers. However, for some students, particularly those for whom English is a second language, the literature review may be a mixture of original writing and verbatim source text appropriated without quotations. Such problematic use of source material leaves students vulnerable to an accusation of plagiarism, which carries severe consequences. Is such textual appropriation common in engineering master’s (...) writing? Furthermore, what, if anything, can be concluded when two texts have been found to have textual material in common? Do existing definitions of plagiarism provide a sufficient framework for determining if an instance of copying is transgressive or not? In a preliminary attempt to answer these questions, text strings from a random sample of 100 engineering master’s theses from the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database were searched for appropriated verbatim source text using the Google search engine. The results suggest that textual borrowing may indeed be a common feature of the master’s engineering literature review, raising questions about the ability of graduate students to synthesize the literature. The study also illustrates the difficulties of making a determination of plagiarism based on simple textual similarity. A context-specific approach is recommended when dealing with any instance of apparent copying. (shrink)

It is widely held that reflexivity is the defining feature of selfhood: the ability of the self to stand in a certain relation to itself. The question of how exactly to theorize this self-relation, however, has been the source of ongoing debate. In recent years, Kantian and post-Kantian approaches such as Christine Korsgaard’s constitutivism and Richard Moran’s commitment view, have attempted to establish the priority of the agential over the epistemic self-relation, thereby re-orientating the debate away from metaphysics and epistemology (...) towards ethics and moral psychology. Despite the important progress they make towards a de-alienated and reified understanding of the self-relation, however, I argue that the Kantian paradigm is ultimately inadequate because its methodological individualism makes it incapable of accounting for the irreducibly social dimension of the self-relation and, therefore, of successfully making the transition from ethics to social and political philosophy. In other words, an adequate ontology of the self-relation is possible only as a social ontology. In order to motivate this thesis, I appeal to two examples that expose the “social deficit” of the Kantian approach: Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of race/racism in “The Lived Experience of the Black” and the phenomenon of cultural collapse in Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. I then go on to provide a sketch of an alternative approach based on the notion of “self-appropriation”, distinguishing it from Rahel Jaeggi’s use of the term in her recent critique of alienation, in the process. (shrink)

Ethical reasoning is an integral part of the work of a clinical ethics consultant. Ethical reasoning has a close relationship with an individual’s beliefs and values, which, for religious adherents, are likely to be tightly connected with their spiritual perspectives. As a result, for individuals who identify with a religious tradition, the process of thinking through ethical questions is likely to be influenced by their religious worldview. The connection between ethical reasoning and one’s spiritual perspective raises questions about the role (...) that CECs’ personal religious worldviews should play in their professional lives and their consultative work. This paper offers numerous arguments critiquing the inclusion of a consultant’s own spiritual perspective in her work and has identified only limited circumstances under which such inclusion might be permissible. In particular, these arguments lead to the conclusion that a CEC’s personal beliefs should never influence her ethical analysis or development of a recommendation. Further, religious appeals should not be used in communication during decision-making conversations other than to describe the patient or surrogate’s stated perspective. There may be limited cases in which a CEC may share her spiritual worldview with a patient with the intent of building a collaborative relationship, but such situations should be approached with extreme caution. (shrink)