We appreciate Fritz’s thoughtful analysis of the asymmetry between legal protections for negative and positive conscience claims and are particularly interested in further exploring the conc...

We believe that clinical ethics consultants (CECs) should offer advice, options, and recommendations to attending physicians and their teams. In their article in this issue of The Journal of Clinical Ethics, however, Kornfeld and Prager give CECs a somewhat different role. The CEC they describe may at times be more aptly understood as a medical interventionist who appropriates the roles of the attending physician and the medical team than as a traditional CEC. In these remarks, we distinguish the role of (...) the CEC from that of the physician, in contrast to some of these authors’ recommendations, which confuse the two roles. (shrink)

Abstract:The central inquiry of this article concerns the ethical orientation within post-structuralism, specifically questioning its potential affinity with deontology. While the “philosophers of difference” offer divergent perspectives on the doctrine of judgment, Jacques Derrida folds it within Deconstruction as a nomo-aporetic transcendental horizon. To understand this operation and its potential ethical significance, I suggest Jean-François Lyotard offers the best counter-model with which to compare against Derrida’s. Amongst their direct and indirect exchanges with each other is a dialogue concerning the law (...) and its fundamental ground. Through their respective readings of Kafka – Derrida’s reading of “Before the Law” and Lyotard’s reading of “In the Penal Colony” – both attempt to delineate how the specific nature of the ground of the law determines the way in which an individual becomes subject to the law. Despite the enigmatic nature of their discourses, their comparison reveals converging and diverging trajectories in their ethical reflections as they push toward thinking the limits of lawfulness. Through such a comparative study of their texts, this exploration aims to unveil the shared fugitive vector of their ethical contemplations within the post-structuralist framework. (shrink)

With the publication of Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates, Kiff Bamford has securely situated himself as a scholar of ‘the marginal’, in the sense of recovering the neglected texts...

Emirbayer and Johnson critique the failure to engage fully Bourdieu’s relational analysis in empirical work, but are weak in giving direction for rectifying the problem. Following their recommendation for studying organizations-in-fields and organizations-as-fields, I argue for the benefits of analogical comparison using case studies of organizations as the units of analysis. Doing so maximizes the number of Bourdieusian concepts that can be deployed in an explanation. Further, it maximizes discovery of the oft-neglected links among history, competition, resources, sites of contestation (...) and struggle, relations of dominance and domination, and reproduction of inequality. Perhaps most important, case studies can identify the connection between macro-, meso-, and micro-level factors in the formation and shaping of habitus. To support my claims empirically, I draw from case study research (Vaughan The challenger launch decision: Risky technology, culture, and deviance at NASA, 1996; Signals and interpretive work: The role of culture in a theory of practical action. pp. 28–56, 2002) that verifies Bourdieu’s as the “Theory of Practical Action” that supplies the micro-level component to the new institutionalism (DiMaggio and Powell, Introduction. pp. 1–41, 1991). (shrink)

The use of the capability approach as an evaluative tool for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policy and programs in developing countries, in particular at a grass-roots community level, is an emerging field of application. However, one of the difficulties with ICT for development (ICT4D) evaluations is in linking what is often no more than a resource, for example basic access, to actual outcomes, or means to end. This article argues that the capability approach provides a framework for evaluating the (...) strength of this linkage and that the latter is a key determinant of whether or not communities sustain ICT4D programs beyond the initial start-up phase. The argument is made by describing an evaluative application of the capabilities approach to community ICT4D programs using two Indigenous community case studies conducted in Cape York, in the far north-east of Australia. Key to the evaluative approach is the identification of community defined, context specific concepts of well-being and constitutive valued functionings and the derivation from this of required capabilities. This move away from normative definitions of capabilities or capability types to a definition that reflects the Indigenous culture, history, circumstances, and well-being aspirations of each community is intended to give a voice to the people and at the same time provide a deeper informational base—through narrative—for policy and program design than has previously been available. The article concludes that by operationalising the capability approach in a context and purpose specific way, policy and program design can be improved so as to include more communities on the margin and thereby achieve more socially inclusive ICT based development. A process is also outlined for using the evaluative application of the capability approach for community ICT4D within a policy feedback loop. (shrink)