Clinical Ethics, Ahead of Print. This paper is a response to a recent BMJ Blog: ‘The duty to treat: where do the limits lie?’ Members of the Surrey Heartlands Integrated Care Service Clinical Ethics Group reflected on arguments in the Blog in relation to resuscitation during the COVID-19 pandemic.Clinicians have had to contend with ever-changing and conflicting guidance from the Resuscitation Council UK and Public Health England regarding personal protective equipment requirements in resuscitation situations. St John Ambulance had different guidance (...) for first responders.The situation regarding resuscitation led the CEG to consider ethical aspects of health care professionals’ responses to the need for resuscitation during COVID-19. Members agreed that professionals should, ideally, have the level of PPE required for an aerosol generating procedure. However, there was no consensus regarding professionals’ duty to care when this is not available. On the one hand, it was agreed that the casualty/patient’s interests regarding resuscitation should be prioritised due to professionals’ contract with the public and professional privilege. On the other hand, risk thresholds were considered relevant to individual decision-making and professionals’ duty to care. All agreed that decision-making should not be influenced by rewards or reprimands. It was agreed also that decisions to resuscitate should not be considered as moral heroism or supererogatory - regardless of PPE availability - but rather as ‘minimally decent’. We agreed that it may be acceptable for professionals, with good reasons, to opt out of resuscitation attempts and these should be reflected on and discussed before the event. (shrink)

Mary Anne Perkins re-examines Coleridge's claim to have developed a "logosophic" system which attempted "to reduce all knowledges into harmony." She pays particular attention to his later writings, some of which are still unpublished. She suggests that the accusations of plagiarism and of muddled, abstruse metaphysics which have been levelled at him may be challenged by a thorough reading of his work in which its unifying principle is revealed. She explores the various meanings of the term "logos," a (...) recurrent theme in every area of Coleridge's thought--philosophy, religion, natural science, history, political and social criticism, literary theory, and psychology. Coleridge was responding to the concerns of his own time, a revolutionary age in which increasing intellectual and moral fragmentation and confusion seemed to him to threaten both individuals and society. Drawing on the whole of Western intellectual history, he offered a ground for philosophy which was relational rather than mechanistic. He is one of those few thinkers whose work appears to become more interesting and his perceptions more acute as the historical gulf widens. This book is a contribution to the reassessment that he deserves. (shrink)

In the UK, the Recommended Summary Plan for Emergency Care and Treatment (ReSPECT) is a widely used process, designed to facilitate shared decision-making between a clinician and a patient or, if the patient lacks capacity to participate in the conversation, a person close to the patient. A key outcome of the ReSPECT process is a set of recommendations, recorded on the patient-held ReSPECT form, that reflect the conversation. In an emergency, these recommendations are intended to inform clinical decision-making, and thereby (...) enable the attending clinician—usually a general practitioner (GP) or paramedic—to act in the patient’s best interests. This study is the first to explore the extent to which ReSPECT recommendations realise their goal of informing best interests decision-making in community contexts. Using a modified framework analysis approach, we triangulate interviews with patients and their relatives, GPs and nurses and care home staff. Our findings show that inconsistent practices around recording patient wishes, diverging interpretations of the meaning and authority of recommendations and different situational contexts may affect the interpretation and enactment of ReSPECT recommendations. Enacting ReSPECT recommendations in an emergency can be fraught with complexity, particularly when attending clinicians need to interpret recommendations that did not anticipate the current emergency. This may lead to decision-making that compromises the patient’s best interests. We suggest that recording patients’ values and preferences in greater detail on ReSPECT forms may help overcome this challenge, in providing attending clinicians with richer contextual information through which to interpret treatment recommendations. (shrink)

This book offers both theoretical overviews and practical approaches for educators, academics, education students and parents who are interested in transforming schools. It encourages reinvigorating approaches to learning and teaching that can easily be integrated into both public and private K-12 school classrooms, with many ideas also applicable to higher education. It supports an educational system based on the beliefs that heart and spirit are intertwined with mind and intellect, and that inner peace, wisdom, compassion, and conscience can be developed (...) together with academic content and skills. (shrink)

This paper describes the results of a multi-country survey of governance approaches for the use of digital contact tracing (DCT) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the countries in our survey represent two distinct models of DCT governance, both of which are flawed. The “data protection model” emphasizes privacy protections at the expense of public health benefit, while the “emergency response model” sacrifices transparency and accountability, prompting concerns about excessive governance surveillance. The ethical and effective use of (...) DCT in the future requires a new governance approach that is better suited to this novel use of mobile phone data to promote public health.”. (shrink)

Human persons exist longer than a single moment in time; they persist through time. However, so far it has not been possible to make this natural and widespread assumption metaphysically comprehensible. The philosophical debate on personal identity is rather stuck in a dilemma: reductionist theories explain personal identity away, while non-reductionist theories fail to give any informative account at all. This chapter argues that this dilemma emerges from an underlying commitment, shared by both sides of in the debate, to an (...) ontology which that gives the priority to static unchanging things. The claim defended here is that the dilemma of personal identity can be overcome if we acknowledge the biological nature of human persons and switch to a process- ontological framework that takes process and change to be ontologically primary. Human persons are biological higher-order processes, rather than things, and their identity conditions can be scientifically investigated. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOrganization and management researchers praise the value of care in the workplace. However, they overlook the conflict between caring for work and for coworkers, which resonates with the dilemma of care allocation highlighted by ethicists of care. Through an in-depth qualitative study of two organizations, we examine how this dilemma is confronted in everyday organizational life. We draw on the concept of boundary work to explain how employees negotiate the boundary of their caring responsibilities in ways that grants or denies (...) care to coworkers. We argue that the possibility of an ethics of care for coworkers requires boundary work that suspends the separation of personal and professional selves and constitutes the worker as a whole person. We contribute to research on care in organizations by showing how care for coworkers may be enabled or undermined by maintaining or suppressing the care allocation dilemma. (shrink)

The current pandemic period has triggered a series of changes in society, at both individual and collective behavioral levels. These changes were perceived as either positive or negative by the impacted bodies, leading to both social change and positive interactions in a tense context. In this paper, the authors will deal with Pandemica Panotpica, subjugation infiltrating all levels of society, and the approach adopted by several countries in trying to find countermeasures to combat the virus' proliferation. Our research scope began (...) at the onset of the pandemic and ended on early January 2021. (shrink)

Many philosophers have defended the view that we are subject to the following evidential ought: “One ought to believe in accordance with one's evidence.” Although they agree on this, a more fundamental question keeps dividing them: from where does the evidential ought derive its normative force? The instrinsicalist answer to this question is sometimes described as the claim that "there is a brute epistemic value in believing in accordance with one's evidence" (Cowie, 2014, 4005). But what does this really mean? (...) Intrinsicalists' negative claim is that the normative source of the evidential ought has nothing to do with the fulfilment of our epistemic purposes. But what is their positive claim exactly? This paper aims at improving our understanding of intrinsicalism. Its conclusion is that there is only one possible way of being an intrinsicalist. Intrinsicalists need to be constitutivists. (shrink)

Paul Grobstein, Eleanor A. Bliss Professor of Biology at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, USA passed away Tuesday, June 28, 2011. Since Paul came to Bryn Mawr in 1986, he taught courses ranging from "Introductory Biology" and "Philosophy of Science" to "Evolution of Stories" and "The Brain and Education." Paul founded the Summer Institutes for K-12 Teachers, which brought hundreds of local educators to campus to consider new ways of teaching science and math. He served as chair of the Biology Department (...) and was instrumental in the establishment and success of the Center for Science in Society at Bryn Mawr College. (shrink)

Because of the transfer of responsibility from hospitals to community-based settings, providers in home-based care have more responsibilities and a wider range of tasks and responsibilities than before, often with limited resources. The increased responsibilities and the complexity of tasks and patient groups may lead to several ethical challenges. A systematic search in the databases MEDLINE, CINAHL, and SveMed+ was carried out in February 2019 and August 2020. The research question was translated into a modified PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison, and (...) Outcome) worksheet. A total of 40 articles were included. The review is conducted according to the Vancouver Protocol. The main findings from the systematic literature review show that ethical challenges experienced by healthcare and social care providers in home-based care are related to autonomy and balancing ethical principles, decisions regarding intensity of care, challenges related to priority settings, truth-telling, and balancing the professional role. Findings regarding ethical challenges within home-based care are in line with findings from institutional healthcare and social care settings. However, some significant differences from the institutional context are also highlighted. (shrink)

The digital shift leads to increasing changes. Employees can deal with changes through informal learning that enables needs-based development. For successful informal learning, self-regulated learning is crucial, i.e., to set goals, plan, apply strategies, monitor, and regulate learning for example by applying resource strategies. However, existing SRL models all refer to formal learning settings. Because informal learning differs from formal learning, this study investigates whether SRL models can be transferred from formal learning environments into informal work settings. More precisely, are (...) all facets relevant, and what are the relational patterns? Because informal workplace learning occurs through interaction with the context, this study investigates the influence of context, i.e., organizational learning culture and job characteristics on SRL. Structural equation modeling of N = 170 employees in various industries showed the relevance of the self-reported metacognitive strategies planning, monitoring, and regulation; the resource strategies help-seeking and effort regulation; and deep processing strategy elaboration. However, there was no evidence for organization strategies. The learning strategies were associated with self-efficacy and mastery-approach goal orientation. Regarding context, results supported indirect effects over self-motivational beliefs of learning strategies. Organizational learning culture was connected with mastery-approach goal orientation, whereas job characteristics autonomy and feedback were related to self-efficacy, which were again related to SRL strategies. Therefore, context can empower employees not only to accomplish their tasks but to develop themselves by applying SRL strategies. The results are discussed, and practical implications are outlined. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

This third volume completes the text of the cycle of 294 English Wycliffite sermons; the first two volumes appeared in 1983 and 1987 respectively. The 120 sermons here were intended to provide material for all the weekday occasions for which the Sarum rite offers a separate gospel reading; such complete coverage of ferial days is unparalleled in English medieval homiliaries, and seems unknown elsewhere in contemporary European cycles of sermons. The introduction to the present book, which is intended to be (...) used along with the material in the previous volumes, describes the state of the text in these manuscripts and their relation to each other. Two further chapters consider questions relating to the whole cycle: the fidelity of the biblical translation in the sermons to the Vulgate texts; and the complicated issue of the relation between these English sermons and the Latin sermons of John Wyclif himself. A fourth volume will provide a commentary on the individual sermons, consider the recurrent issues discussed within them, and offer suggestions concerning the origins of the collection. (shrink)

We are occasionally responsible for our beliefs. But is this doxastic responsibility analogous to any non-attitudinal form of responsibility? What I shall call the consequential conception of doxastic responsibility holds that the kind of responsibility that we have for our beliefs is indeed analogous to the kind of responsibility that we have for the consequences of our actions. This article does two things, both with the aim of defending this somewhat unsophisticated but intuitive view of doxastic responsibility. First, it emphasizes (...) the advantage of preserving, as the consequential conception does, the analogy with the non-attitudinal realm, i.e., with the realm of actions and their consequences. Second, this article regiments the most important objections to the consequential conception and answers them. The upshot is that there are no serious drawbacks to the consequential conception. There is, therefore, no reason not to favour it over accounts of doxastic responsibility that do not preserve the analogy with the non-attitudinal realm. (shrink)

Do human embryos have a disposition to personhood? This has been argued within recent attempts to reformulate the classical argument from potentiality for the protection of human embryos with the help of the concept of disposition. In this paper, I analyse the central ontological premise of this new approach and show that any hopes of rehabilitating in dispositionalist terms the idea of a potential to personhood inherent in human embryos are mistaken. The dispositionalist version of the potentiality argument navigates in (...) same metaphysical waters as its predecessor and, hence, collides just the same with biological facts concerning human embryogenesis. (shrink)

Management and organization researchers are being called to conduct research that is more caring, yet the concept of care and how to practice it within the profession is undertheorized. Adopting a feminist epistemology and methodology, we develop the concept of care by weaving the personal, ethical, and political into the research process. First, we reflect critically on how aspects of care—attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness (Tronto, Moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care, Routledge, 1993; Tronto, Caring democracy: (...) markets, equality, and justice, New York University Press, 2013)—unfolded in our personal research experiences, and secondly, we conduct a review of articles published in management and organization studies and analyse expressed or concealed conceptions of care in scholars’ accounts of research purpose and ethics. We find three ethical sensibilities at the heart of enacting care: encountering the ‘other’, interpreting roles and responsibilities, and deliberating needs and resources. We contribute to a feminist research ethics by highlighting issues related to care that are concealed in dominant ethos guiding management and organization research. Further, we develop methodological insights for implementing an ethic of care as an alternative ethical standpoint in business research ethics. Finally, we provide suggestions for how to embed more care within research ethics practices in academic institutions. (shrink)

In the second half of the twentieth century, an influential strain of ethical thinking conceptualized itself as a revival of an ancient ethical tradition, as against modern moral philosophy, and in particular as a recovery of two central ethical concepts: virtue and eudaimonia. This revival paved the way for virtue ethics to be regarded as one of the “big three” approaches in ethics, alongside deontological and consequentialist approaches. Early developments of virtue ethics were eudaimonist, harking back to ancient Greek philosophers, (...) espe- cially Aristotle. Now, virtue ethics is understood as a genus, eudaimonist virtue ethics being only one species (Swanton 2003: 1), and virtue has become an important concept for other approaches in ethics, and in other areas of philosophy, such as epistemology. In this chapter, we provide a sketch of this revival, beginning with the features of modern moral philosophy, discontent with which provided the impetus for the revival, and concluding with some speculations about future developments of virtue ethics and the concept of virtue. (shrink)

« Reprise continuelle de soi par soi » selon Paul Ricœur, l'identité ne cesse de se renégocier au fil du temps, des événements de la vie, des jeux entre conscient et inconscient, entre individu et collectivité, entre passé et présent... Dans cette chaîne permanente de recompositions personnelles, comment les croyances évoluent-elles? À quelles injonctions obéissent les ruptures ou les continuités dans la transmission des convictions politiques? Réflexions croisées de sociologues, politistes, philosophes, historiens et psychologues sur nos identités politiques de plus (...) en plus mobiles, les contributions de cet ouvrage donnent à voir les ressorts des changements politiques qui façonnent l'histoire comme les histoires de vie. Il met au jour la manière dont le politique est travaillé par le temps, qu'il s'agisse du temps collectif des générations ou de celui, plus intime, des âges de la vie. (shrink)

Children learn their native language by exposure to their linguistic and communicative environment, but apparently without requiring that their mistakes be corrected. Such learning from “positive evidence” has been viewed as raising “logical” problems for language acquisition. In particular, without correction, how is the child to recover from conjecturing an over-general grammar, which will be consistent with any sentence that the child hears? There have been many proposals concerning how this “logical problem” can be dissolved. In this study, we review (...) recent formal results showing that the learner has sufficient data to learn successfully from positive evidence, if it favors the simplest encoding of the linguistic input. Results include the learnability of linguistic prediction, grammaticality judgments, language production, and form-meaning mappings. The simplicity approach can also be “scaled down” to analyze the learnability of specific linguistic constructions, and it is amenable to empirical testing as a framework for describing human language acquisition. (shrink)

In a recent paper titled “Content Preservation”, Tyler Burge argues that certain psychological processes play a purely preservative role, and not a justificatory role. Burge’s claim is that the justificatory force of the beliefs sustained by these processes is independent of features of these processes, such as their reliability. The function of these psychological processes is merely to preserve the beliefs in order to “assure the proper working of other cognitive capacities over time”. In particular, Burge claims that the memory (...) processes underlying deductive reasoning and the psychological processes underlying verbal communication are purely preservative. (shrink)

Background: Empathy and moral courage are important virtues in nursing and nursing ethics. Hence, it is of great importance that nursing students and nurses develop their ability to empathize and their willingness to demonstrate moral courage. Research aim: The aim of this article is to explore third-year undergraduate nursing students’ perceptions and experiences in developing empathy and moral courage. Research design: This study employed a longitudinal qualitative design based on individual interviews. Participants and research context: Seven undergraduate nursing students were (...) interviewed during or immediately following their final clinical placement. Ethical considerations: The Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD) approved the study. Participants were informed that their participation was voluntary and were assured confidentiality. They were informed that they could withdraw from the study at any time, without providing reasons. Findings: Affective empathy seemed to be strong among third-year undergraduate nursing students. However, they tried to handle the situations in a ‘professional’ way, and to balance their emotions. At the same time, they expressed how difficult it can be to show moral courage when confronted with poor patient care. In addition, they spoke about a lack of role models during clinical practice and supervision. Conclusions: Undergraduate nursing students are in a vulnerable position throughout their journey to become professional and to develop empathy and moral courage. The professional socialisation and forming of professional empathy and moral courage among nursing students, may be seen as a complex interaction of formal and hidden curriculum, where role models play an important role. We argue that the main theme ‘Vulnerable students – a journey towards professional empathy and moral courage’ may cover the longitudinal project as a whole. This vulnerability is something both teachers and supervisors should be aware of when following up with students in their clinical placements. (shrink)