We discuss a mass change that has its origin in the action of forces on an object. This phenomenon, well-known in the context of quantum field theory (mass renormalization), can be discussed systematically in both classical and quantum mechanics in a framework given by Stückelberg. We employ this framework to resolve an interesting conflict of opinions between Schopenhauer and Hegel in the mid-19th century. We show that Hegel, Kant, and Schopenhauer demonstrated remarkable prescience in their views as seen from a (...) modern perspective. (shrink)

Can we respond to injustices in the world in ways that do more than just address their consequences? In this book, Brooke A. Ackerly argues that what to do about injustice is not just an ethical or moral question, but a political question about assuming responsibility for injustice. Ultimately, Just Responsibility offers a theory of global injustice and political responsibility that can guide action.

The growing gap between demands and resources is putting immense pressure on all government spending in Sweden. The gap is especially apparent in care and services for elderly people in light of the rapid aging of the population. The article considers the decisions and priorities concerning resource allocation in the welfare sector in general and in elderly care in particular. The aim is to describe the political and administrative setting and to provide a conceptual structure that outlines the nature of (...) the problem. Various levels of decision making are identified and discussed in the context of political accountability. Current transitions in elderly care are described with respect to service provision, marketisation, coverage rates, and eligibility standards. Basic principles of distribution are highlighted in order to clarify some central concepts of efficiency and justice, and a number of strategies for actual prioritising are identified. The article concludes with an endorsement of more conscious decisions in resource allocation. Existing knowledge and information concerning the effects of various strategies must be utilised, and the values and assumptions used for setting priorities must be made explicit. (shrink)

The physician charter on medical professionalism creates standards of ethical behaviour for physicians and has been endorsed by professional organisations worldwide. It is based on the cardinal principles of the primacy of patient welfare, patient autonomy, and social welfare. There has been little discussion in the bioethics community of the doctrine of the charter and none from a Jewish ethical perspective. In this essay the authors discuss the obligations of the charter from a Jewish ethical viewpoint and call on other (...) cultures to develop their own unique perspectives on this important document. (shrink)

In recent years attention to the philosophical and literary production of P. A. Florenskii has become commonplace. The thinker's intellectual legacy is very great. In September 1919, Florenskii wrote a prospectus for a collection of his own writings, which would have amounted to nineteen volumes. The collection was not published, for a number of reasons; nonetheless, many of the philosopher's works did come out during his lifetime. Florenskii's writing, published in small editions and scattered among various journals, are still quite (...) inaccessible to readers. (shrink)

This article must open with a Warning. In face of the positive information which the sciences supply, the philosophical contribution to this problem will seem disappointingly negative, or at least mine will do so. For I shall insist, and I think we can only rightly insist, that the philosopher is not yet in a position to produce a satisfactory positive theory of the relation between mind and body. And I shall annoy many of you further by insisting that the old-fashioned (...) “dualism” has not really been disproved. However, even if you do not agree with me, it is at any rate a good general piece of advice that, when we are confronted with a philosophical view which has maintained its ground for a very long time but seems to ourselves or to our generation very unreasonable, we should look specially carefully to find the positive grounds which have made so apparently unplausible a doctrine seem true to so many competent thinkers. (shrink)

After the events of 11 September 2001 and the anthrax letters, terrorism and bioterrorism have become the number one issue and motivation for all sorts of discussions and actions within the USA and in the rest of the world. Therefore, it is no wonder that bioterrorism and the threat of chemical weapons are prevalent issues in bioethical debates throughout the world and especially in the USA.In the Wake of Terror tries to give an American perspective on the most important bioethical (...) issues connected with terrorism and bioterrorism. The book is from the series Basic Bioethics published by the MIT press. The series editors …. (shrink)

In The Face of Emotions, which was Carroll Izard’s first major attempt at elaborating his differential emotions theory (DET), he stated that the book “presents a theoretical framework for the study of emotions and their role in personality and interpersonal processes.” Yet, over the years, his contribution to personality theory has generally been overshadowed by the attention focused on his views on facial expressions and the structure of emotions. This article will begin with a brief overview of the DET perspective (...) on personality development. Then, it will examine how the DET framework can be used to organize recent findings from three lines of research on adult personality. It will conclude with suggestions for future research as well as some personal recollections. (shrink)

In nursing ethics the role of narratives and dialogue has become more prominent in recent years. The purpose of this article is to illuminate a relational-narrative approach to ethics in the context of palliative nursing. The case study presented concerns a difficult relationship between oncology nurses and a husband whose wife was hospitalized with cancer. The husband’s narrative is an expression of depression, social isolation and the loss of hope. He found no meaning in the process of dying and death. (...) The oncology nurses were not able to recognize his emotional and existential problems. A narrative perspective inspired by relational ethics indicates that participants may develop a relational narrative that seeks good for all involved in a situation. In palliative nursing this entails open communication about the fragility of life and approaching death. In relational narratives, answers to these ethical dilemmas are co-authored, contingent and contextual. (shrink)

The persistent educational challenges that fractions pose call for developing novel instructional methods to better prepare students for fraction learning. Here, we examined the effects of a 24-session, Cuisenaire rod intervention on a building block for symbolic fraction knowledge, continuous and discrete non-symbolic proportional reasoning, in children who have yet to receive fraction instruction. Participants were 34 second-graders who attended the intervention (intervention group) and 15 children who did not participate in any sessions (control group). As attendance at the intervention (...) sessions was irregular (median = 15.6 sessions, range = 1–24), we specifically examined the effect of the number of sessions completed on their non-symbolic proportional reasoning. Our results showed that children who attended a larger number of sessions increased their ability to compare non-symbolic continuous proportions. However, contrary to our expectations, they also decreased their ability to compare misleading discretized proportions. In contrast, children in the Control group did not show any change in their performance. These results provide further evidence on the malleability of non-symbolic continuous proportional reasoning and highlight the rigidity of counting knowledge interference on discrete proportional reasoning. (shrink)

The questions of this article are: what can we learn from deliberative democratic theory, its critics, the practices of local deliberative communities, the needs of potential participants, and the experiences of virtual communities that would be useful in designing a technology-facilitated institution for global civil society that is deliberative and democratic in its values? And what is the appropriate design of such an online institution so that it will be attentive to the undemocratic forces enabled by power inequalities that can (...) emerge in discursive communities? I answer these questions with an institutional innovation that meets a need of global civil society and that is responsive to critics of deliberative democratic theory and attentive to the particular agents engaged in women's human rights activism. (shrink)

Exposition of Advaita based on selections from the Vedāntaparibhāsā by Dharmarājādhvarindra, 17th cent., Yatīndramatadīpikā by Śrīnivāsadāsa, 17th cent., and Śrībhāsya by Rāmānuja, 1017-1137; with profuse quotations.

Objectives: To study knowledge and attitudes of hospital ethics committee members at the first workshop for ethics committees in Croatia.Design: Before/after cross-sectional study using a self administered questionnaire.Setting: Educational workshop for members of hospital ethics committees, Zagreb, 2003.Main outcome measurements: Knowledge and attitudes of participants before and after the workshop; everyday functioning of hospital ethics committees.Results: The majority of the respondents came from committees with at least five members. The majority of ethics committees were appointed by the governing bodies of (...) their hospitals. Most committees were founded after the implementation of the law on health protection in 1997. Membership structure and functions were established on the basis of that law. Analysis of research protocols was the main part of their work. Other important functions—education, case analysis, guidelines formation—were neglected. Members’ level of knowledge was not sufficient for the complicated tasks they were supposed to perform. However, it was significantly higher after the workshop. Most respondents felt their knowledge should be improved by additional education. Their views on certain issues and bioethical dilemmas displayed a high level of paternalism and over protectiveness, which did not change after the workshop.Conclusions: The committees developed according to bureaucratic requirements. Furthermore, there are concerns about members’ knowledge levels. More efforts need to be made to use education to improve the quality of the work. Additional research is necessary to explore ethics committees’ work in Croatia especially in the hospital setting. (shrink)

In the real world, many people suffer as a function of their subordinate position in social hierarchy. Deliberative, relativist, and essentialist political theorists have sketched philosophies of social criticism that alone are inadequate for criticizing some harmful social values, practices, and norms. Certainly, theirs are critical theories in the sense that they are actionable, coherent, and self-reflective. But they are not adequate theories of social criticism. They do not specify satisfactorily the roles, qualifications, and methodology of social critics worried about (...) the struggles and wishes of real people. I specify all three. Drawing from the practical experience of a wide variety of women activists, I generalize about the roles and qualifications of the social critic. In addition, I formally articulate a method of social criticism that feminists have been developing. Collectively, feminists--particularly Third World women activists-have pioneered a method of social criticism that allows them to criticize existing social values, practices, and norms that perpetuate inequalities. The method of social criticism I propose provides a discipline for ongoing questioning and evaluation of social practices by a society with the help of social critics. In the process of explicating my own philosophy of social criticism, I offer criticisms of the implications for social criticism of three political philosophies--deliberative democratic theory, Michael Walzer's relativism, and Martha Nussbaum's essentialism--and argue that feminist critics have managed to achieve in practice what adherents of those three schools do incompletely in theory. (shrink)

The validity of the double effect doctrine is examined in euthanasia and abortion. In these two situations killing is a method of treatment. It is argued that the doctrine cannot apply to the care of the dying. Firstly, doctors are obliged to harm patients in order to do good to them. Secondly, patients should make their own value judgments about being mutilated or killed. Thirdly, there is little intuitive moral difference between direct and indirect killing. Nor can the doctrine apply (...) to abortion. Doctors kill fetuses as a means of treating the mother. They also kill them as an inevitable side effect of other treatment. Drawing a moral distinction between the direct and the indirect killing gives counterintuitive results. It is suggested that pragmatic rules, not ethics, govern practices around euthanasia and cause it to be more restricted than abortion. (shrink)

In this paper I shall use terms such as “intrinsically good” which may be deemed old fashioned by many readers and which certainly to my own mind presuppose an objective non-naturalistic theory of ethics. I still hold such a theory and I have not mastered the new jargon by which a sort of higher synthesis between that and other theories is supposed to have been effected, but I do not think that such a view as mine of ethics in general (...) is necessarily presupposed if one is to understand or even agree with the contentions of my article. These relate to a specific problem as to certain ethical actions, which will arise on any view that admits the possibility of giving any sort of legitimate reasons for ethical judgments, as we all do in practice. After all a naturalist can easily translate “intrinsically good” into his own terms, say, valued for its own sake by most people who experience it, and there will still be a question as to what is intrinsically and what is merely instrumentally good and other questions as to what is the logical nature of certain arguments in ethics. (shrink)

El liberalismo de Carlos S. Nino evolucionó desde sus primeros trabajos vinculados al derecho penal, hacia la construcción de una teoría de la democracia deliberativa. Desde sus comienzos, siguiendo a los autores liberales clásicos como John Stuart Mill, hasta el final en donde adhirió a un liberalismo igualitario, hubo construcciones que acompañaron este proceso, como el concepto de autonomía personal, y también ciertos ideales morales, como un oposición concreta al perfeccionismo. El texto presenta al liberalismo de Nino al comienzo y (...) al final de su obra para mostrar que el antiperfeccionismo originado en el liberalismo clásico que servía de base para construir su concepción de la autonomía, se mantuvo inalterado durante todo este proceso de evolución dificultando la compatibilización de su teoría de la responsabilidad penal con su teoría de la democracia deliberativa, orientada hacia el liberalismo igualitario. (shrink)

There are many people in the world who want to be Somebody. Let us describe someone as Somebody who comes to believe that, in one or more respects, he or she is a special or significant person and who succeeds, through whatever means, in acquiring some sort of reputation and some sort of fame. People want to become Somebody because they believe that unless they succeed in that respect they will turn out to be a mere mediocrity, or worse still, (...) to be thought of as a mere mediocrity. People want to leave some sort of mark in this world before they die. They do not want their passage through this world to be utterly ineffectual. This, I think, is the seed from which the ideal of being Somebody emerges. (shrink)

Russian Romanticism, which first acquired recognizable contours in the 1820s, was a substantively significant phenomenon in Russian culture. Russian Romanticism assumed the unique forms of a sociophilosophical and literaryesthetic current that did not take shape within the confines of a purely literary movement. Romanticism was an important element in the culturalhistorical development of mankind; it was a special type of philosophicalhistorical interpretation of the world and a special type of esthetic awareness and literary-artistic conduct.

With its roots in clinical and educational psychology, school psychology is an ever-changing field that encompasses a diversity of topics. The Oxford Handbook of School Psychology synthesizes the most vital and relevant literature in all of these areas, producing a state-of-the-art, authoritative resource for practitioners, researchers, and parents.Comprising chapters authored by the leading figures in school psychology, The Oxford Handbook of School Psychology focuses on the significant issues, new developments, and scientific findings that continue to change the practical landscape. The (...) handbook's focuses include:allegiance to the reciprocal relationship between science and practice to promote problem-solving and enrichment modelsservice delivery designed to improve competencies of all studentsthe relationship between general cognitive ability and important life outcomesthe development of viable and enduring educational, family, and community systems to support studentsincreasing student diversity and the necessity of increased sensitivity to the influences of social, cultural, political, and legislative variables of schoolingoutlining tenable reasons why, since the end of World War II, children from kindergarten through the secondary grades have generally not been the recipients of a superior or efficient educational systemall relevant legislation, including the No Child Left Behind Act, and the ongoing question of who or what is responsible for the inadequate academic preparation of inner-city childrenbuilding a cumulative knowledge base to better facilitate students' academic, social, and personal competencies including the promotion of positive mental health and subjective well-beingThe scholarship compiled here is a must-read for practitioners, students, and faculty, and an ideal resource for parents seeking a scientific approach to the efficacy of school psychology practices. In both breadth and depth, this handbook promises to serve as the benchmark reference work for years to come. (shrink)

Some approaches to the assessment of moral intuitions are discussed. The controlled ethical trial isolates a moral issue from confounding factors and thereby clarifies what a person's intuition actually is. Casuistic reasoning from situations, where intuitions are clear, suggests or modifies principles, which can then help to make decisions in situations where intuitions are unclear. When intuitions are defended by a supporting principle, that principle can be tested by finding extreme cases, in which it is counterintuitive to follow the principle. (...) An approach to the resolution of conflict between valid moral principles, specifically the utilitarian and justice principles, is considered. It is argued that even those who justify intuitions by a priori principles are often obliged to modify or support their principles by resort to the consideration of consequences. (shrink)

‘PROOFS of God’ are under a cloud today, and whether the cloud can be dissipated or not, I am not going to try to dissipate it in this article. Modern thinkers have created a mental climate very unfavourable to metaphysics, but they have certainly not succeeded in disproving on principle the possibility of valid and fruitful metaphysical arguments even in the old transcendent sense of ‘metaphysics’. However, I must admit that in my opinion the best that can be said of (...) arguments for the existence of God is that they give some intellectual support to the belief, not that they are really decisive. If this is so, it becomes of very special importance to consider whether those may be right who maintain that we can come to knowledge of or at least justified belief in God otherwise than by inference. I am not considering the views of those who base the belief solely on authority: argument would be required to decide whether we ought to accept an authority, and if so which. What I am referring to is the claim that there are certain 'mystical' and other religious experiences which can without argument adequately and rationally assure one of God's existence. Obviously from the nature of the case a man who makes this claim for himself cannot prove to others that he is right, but can any good reason be given to support the view that he is wrong? If not, the possibility remains that those who dispute with him are in a similar position to that of a tonedeaf man disagreeing with Beethoven about the value of music. (shrink)

The author discusses the claim that owing to the lack of reference to ordinary experience by which religious assertions could be tested, there is nothing in the mind of the person who makes such religious assertions which could conceivably be objectively true. the author maintains that such a view of religious assertions is groundless, and that, if true, it would leave little of value in religion. (staff).

The editor suggested my writing an article on the question whether it was possible to provide an ethics based upon principles which would be agreed to by all enlightened men, and he further suggested that I should begin the article by stating clearly what morality is. That is a somewhat difficult task, because while “morality” might be defined as “living as one ought,” it is a very disputable question whether and how this “ought” is itself to be defined, and I (...) could not undertake to deal with this question by the way as an introduction to an article on something else. It is, however, clear that there is another sense of “ought” besides the strictly moral sense. We do use the term in cases where it does not entail that a man is neglecting his moral duty if he does not do what he “ought.” For instance we say: “You ought to have seen that film,” “You ought not to have made that move,” “You ought to have seen through that argument,” even “Hitler ought to have invaded England after Dunkirk” where we should have regarded it as the reverse of a good thing if he had done what we say he ought. In none of these cases are we asserting a moral obligation. For we do not ordinarily regard people as under a moral obligation to seek their own pleasure, nor to make certain moves in a game, and while we should say that in matters of serious concern a person is morally obliged to do his best to form a true view as to the merits of a relevant argument, we should not say that he was morally obliged actually to form a true view, for this does not depend solely on his will. And in the fourth instance the action is one which we should think morally wrong rather than morally obligatory. What is there in common between “ought” as used in these cases and the moral “ought”? It is that in each case the action fits the situation, either wholly, or with certain limitations, as in the last instance where we presumably mean that to invade England would have fitted in better with Hitler's ends in the given environment than did the policy Hitler actually adopted. (shrink)

The bearing of certain psychological doctrines upon ethical theory is important, and has been made use of especially by those who espouse empiricism in Ethics. It is the purpose of this paper to examine some of these leading doctrines and the ethical theory which has been connected with them. In doing so, it is appropriate to select for examination the views of Professor W. McDougall, as expressed principally in his Social Psychology and Outline of Psychology ; and this for two (...) reasons. One is, that these views are significant of much more than the opinions of one man. They may be taken quite fairly as representative, in the main, of a definite body of doctrine concerning the nature and development of moral experience. (shrink)

Papineau has suggested that the Principle of Non-Contradiction is a logical law that ?verificationists? are not entitled to claim as a prioritrue. The Principle, like that of Excluded Middle, is not sufficiently grounded in the ?miserly? epistemology of verificationism to be proven in ?verificationist logic?. We examine who might be challenged by this claim: who are the ?verificationists?? We defend our candidates against Papineau's criticisms and other attacks, but this leaves the verificationist open to a different criticism.

Nobody interested in philosophy need be deterred by Kant's reputation for difficulty from familiarizing himself with his ethics. While the Critique of Pure Reason and his other non-ethical works are very hard to follow, the first two chapters of the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals at least are clear and straightforward and presuppose little previous acquaintance with philosophy. The third chapter is not about ethics as such but about the metaphysical problem of freedom and should be omitted by (...) anyone who is not familiar with Kant's general philosophy, but the first two. (shrink)