German philosopher Martin Heidegger stirred educators when in 1951 he claimed teaching is more difficult than learning because teachers must ‘learn to let learn’. However in the main he left the aphorism unexplained as part of a brief four-paragraph, less than two-page set of observations concerning the relationship of teaching to learning; and concluded at the end of those observations that to become a teacher is an ‘exalted matter’. This paper investigates both of Heidegger's claims, interpreting letting learn in the (...) context of Heidegger's larger philosophical project, and suggesting why in light of that project to become a teacher is an exalted concern. The methodology guiding the inquiry is largely hermeneutic, the purpose of the essay to interpret teaching from a Heideggerian perspective: its nature and general method. (shrink)

Innovations in information technologies have facilitated the development of new styles of research networks and forms of governance. This is evident in genomics where increasingly, research is carried out by large, interdisciplinary consortia focussing on a specific research endeavour. The UK10K project is an example of a human genomics consortium funded to provide insights into the genomics of rare conditions, and establish a community resource from generated sequence data. To achieve its objectives according to the agreed timetable, the UK10K project (...) established an internal governance system to expedite the research and to deal with the complex issues that arose. The project’s governance structure exemplifies a new form of network governance called ‘pop-up’ governance. ‘Pop-up’ because: it was put together quickly, existed for a specific period, was designed for a specific purpose, and was dismantled easily on project completion. In this paper, we use UK10K to describe how ‘pop-up’ governance works on the ground and how relational, hierarchical and contractual governance mechanisms are used in this new form of network governance. (shrink)

How to formulate the doctrine of relativism -- Evaluating the doctrine of relativism.

Hearing the difference between a patriarchal voice and a relational voice defines a paradigm shift: a change in the conception of the human world. Theorizing connection as primary and fundamental in human life leads to a new psychology, which shifts the grounds for philosophy and political theory. A crucial distinction is made between a feminine ethic of care and a feminist ethic of care. Voice, relationship, resistance, and women become central rather than peripheral in this reframing of the human world.

In “Robots, Trust and War” Simpson claims that victory in counter-insurgency conflicts requires that military forces and their governing body win the ‘hearts and minds’ of civilians. Consequently, forces made up primarily of autonomous robots would be ineffective in these conflicts for two reasons. Firstly, because civilians cannot rationally trust them because they cannot act from a motive based on good character. If they ever did develop this capacity then the purpose of sending them to war in our stead would (...) be lost because there would be no moral saving. Secondly, because if robot forces did offer a moral saving then this would signal that the deploying government could not be trusted to be committed to the conflict. I disagree with both claims. I argue firstly that there are less demanding grounds that could allow robot forces to be trusted sufficiently to be effective whilst still achieving a moral saving over the deployment of human ones. Secondly, that this moral saving would not necessarily signal that the deploying body lacked commitment because its interpretation would be highly context-dependent. I conclude therefore, contra-Simpson, that robot forces could plausibly be effective in counter-insurgency engagements in the foreseeable future. I suggest therefore that there may be a case for developing a more finely grained understanding of the opportunities for, and challenges of, their use. (shrink)

Most normative advice to individuals about what they should do to help prevent climate change focuses on reductions in personal emissions. This is consistent with an accountancy model of morality, with perpetrators held responsible for the harms they individually cause. An alternative focus receiving less popular and philosophical attention, but with greater potential to achieve substantial mitigation outcomes, is citizen activism for systemic reforms. Rather than perpetration priority moral concern can be directed to bystanding. To more effectively guide action, reformist (...) ethics need to be informed by psychosociological research on motivation and societal transformation. (shrink)

No descriptive material is available for this title.

Mill's free speech doctrine is distinct from, yet compatible with, his central principle of ‘purely self-regarding’ liberty. Using the crucial analogy with trade, I claim that he defends a broad laissez-faire policy for expression, even though expression is ‘social’ or other-regarding conduct and thus legitimately subject to social regulation. An expedient laissez-faire policy admits of exceptions because speakers can sometimes cause such severe damage to others that coercive interference with the speech is justified. In those relatively few contexts where interference (...) is called for, however, the central principle of self-regarding liberty sets absolute limits to the scope of society's regulatory authority. Regulation can never amount to an outright ban of any type of expression that can be consumed by the individual without direct and immediate harm to others. Nevertheless, and perhaps surprisingly, the central liberty principle admits censorship of certain extraordinary types of expression which necessarily harm others. (shrink)

Codes of professional ethics and cases designed to teach ethical decision making are written for individual professionals and ignore the systems level of analysis. They typically employ a lineal view of causality and overvalue placement of blame as a component of ethical problem solving. This article takes a systems approach to ethical problems and identifies aspects of systems that promote or impede ethical decision making. Psychological abuse of children is used as an example of a problem requiring a coordinated, systemic (...) response to ethical issues such as autonomy, privacy, and confidentiality. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill argued, in hisPrinciples of Political Economy(1848, 7th edn., 1871), that existing laws and customs of private property ought to be reformed to promote a far more egalitarian form of capitalism than hitherto observed anywhere. He went on to suggest that such an ideal capitalism might evolve spontaneously into a decentralized socialism involving a market system of competing worker co-operatives. That possibility of market socialism emerged only as the working classes gradually developed the intellectual and moral qualities required (...) for worker co-operatives to succeed against private firms. Workers would tend to reject the hierarchical wage relation as they developed the requisite personal qualities, he believed, and capitalists, facing escalating wages for skilled labour as a result of the diminishing supply of high-quality workers for hire, would tend to lend their capital to the worker co-operatives ‘at a diminishing rate of interest, and at last, perhaps, even to exchange their capital for terminable annuities. In this or some such mode’, he speculated, ‘the existing accumulations of capital might honestly, and by a kind of spontaneous process, become in the end the joint property of all who participate in their productive employment: a transformation which, thus effected, (and assuming of course that both sexes participate equally in the rights and in the government of the association) would be the nearest approach to social justice, and the most beneficial ordering of industrial affairs for the universal good, which it is possible at present to foresee.’. (shrink)

This paper has its genesis in concerns about the return to “the real” in social and political theory and analysis. This trend is linked to a reaction against the “linguistic turn”, on the grounds that an exclusive focus on language undercuts political analysis by refusing to engage with “material reality”. Foucault and “discourse” are common targets of this critique. Against this interpretation, the authors direct attention to the analytic and political usefulness of Foucault’s concept of “discursive practices”, which, it argues, (...) has been much misunderstood. Discursive practices, as developed by Foucault, refers to the practices of discourses, meaning knowledge formations, not to linguistic practices or language use. The focus is on how knowledge is produced through plural and contingent practices across different sites. Such an approach bridges a symbolic-material distinction and signals the always political nature of “the real”. (shrink)

Finding solutions to complex health problems, such as obesity, violence, and climate change, will require radical changes in cross-disciplinary education, research, and practice. The fundamental determinants of health include many interrelated factors such as poverty, culture, education, environment, and government policies. However, traditional public health training has tended to focus more narrowly on diseases and risk factors, and has not adequately leveraged the rich contributions of sociology, anthropology, economics, geography, communication, political science, and other disciplines. Further, students are often not (...) sufficiently trained to work across sectors to translate research findings into effective, large-scale sustainable actions. During the past 2 decades, national and international organizations have called for more effective interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and translational approaches to graduate education. Although it has been difficult to work across traditional academic boundaries, some promising models draw on pedagogical theory and feature cross-disciplinary training focused on real-world problems, linkage between research, professional practice, community action, and cultivation of leadership skills. We describe the development the Doctor of Public Health program at the University of California, Berkeley, USA and its efforts to improve transdisciplinary and translational research education. We stress the need for international collaboration to improve educational approaches and better evaluate their impact. (shrink)

An interpretation of Isaiah Berlin’s liberal pluralism is presented in which his tragic value pluralism is embedded within, and constrained by the other ingredients of, a common moral horizon that gives priority to the value of human survival, to social rules of decency or justice that are deemed essential to survival, to a minimum core of human rights distributed and sanctioned by such rules, and to a minimum sphere of negative liberty carved out by such basic moral rights. A serious (...) objection is that this interpretation assumes that human survival and human rights are far more important than any conflicting incommensurable values, contrary to the view associated with Berlin’s pluralism that incommensurable values are necessarily incomparable so that any conflict between them cannot be rationally resolved. But the objection is unpersuasive because, whatever Berlin’s idea of incommensurable values is, incommensurability cannot properly be reduced to incomparability: reasonable comparisons of incommensurable values are possible under plausible forms of incommensurability whereas incomparability is arguably an extreme form that tends to disappear with increasing information about competing values. It needs emphasis, however, that Berlin’s writings are marked by various ambiguities and inconsistencies, which require further critical discussion on another occasion. (shrink)

The essays in this book contextualize religion within a variety of cultural transformations. The methodological proposals of theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan, S.J. provide the inspiration and framework for these studies; and each makes its own distinct contribution beyond Lonergan's original work.

Introduction The General Medical Council stipulates that doctors must be competent professionals, not merely scholars and practitioners. Medical school curricula should enable students to develop professional values and competencies. Additionally, medical schools are moving towards integrated undergraduate curricula, Cardiff's C21 being one such example. Methods We carried out an audit to determine the extent to which C21 delivers GMC professionalism competencies, and a student questionnaire to explore student perspective on ethics and professionalism. Results and discussion C21 delivers explicit or implicit (...) teaching for all major GMC competencies, though some missed opportunities remain. The questionnaire responses showed that most students value ethics and professionalism teaching, and that it is most well received when delivered in a variety of ways and contexts throughout the curriculum. We also note that some respondents confuse ethics and professionalism with the policing of student behaviour. Conclusions C21 and curricula like it offer many opportunities for nurturing ethically and professionally competent physicians. Students appear to value this, though there remains confusion between medical school discipline and ethics and professionalism which needs further explication. (shrink)

WINDSOR C, DOUGLAS C and HARVEY T. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 213–222 Nursing and competencies — a natural fit: the politics of skill/competency formation in nursingThe last two decades have seen a significant restructuring of work across Australia and other industrialised economies, a critical part of which has been the appearance of competency based education and assessment. The competency movement is about creating a more flexible and mobile labour force to increase productivity and it does so by redefining work as (...) a set of transferable or ‘soft’ generic skills that is transportable and is the possession of the individual. This article sought to develop an analysis of competency based clinical assessment of nursing students across a bachelor of nursing degree course. This involved an examination of a total of 406 clinical assessment tools that covered the years 1992–2009 and the three years of a bachelor degree. Data analysis generated three analytical findings: the existence of a hierarchy of competencies that prioritises soft skills over intellectual and technical skills; the appearance of skills as personal qualities or individual attributes; and the absence of context in assessment. The article argues that the convergence in nursing of soft skills and the professionalisation project reform has seen the former give legitimacy to the enduring invisibility and devaluation of nursing work. (shrink)

Discrimination represents an important moral problem in the field of business ethics, and is often directed against minority groups. While most of the extant literature studies discrimination against employees, this paper studies discrimination against minority customers, addressing whether customers speaking English with an accent are discriminated against when contacting companies with a complaint. We draw upon the two literature streams of business ethics and service recovery to address discrimination in the service recovery process, as the recovery process after a service (...) failure constitutes a critical incident for customers, in which discrimination would be a particularly important moral problem. The findings confirm that customers speaking with an accent are discriminated against, as employees may evaluate customers as both less credible and less competent depending on their accent. We further show that this discrimination extends to negative outcomes: service employees offer customers speaking with an accent lower compensation, and are less likely to go the extra mile for them. Having identified the existence of a discriminatory practice in the service recovery process, we further uncover both an underlying reason and a potential solution. Our results show that employees’ level of cultural intelligence helps alleviate discrimination. We conclude that companies could benefit from including cultural intelligence in the recruitment and training of their employees. (shrink)

The author compares myths about meat-eating with myths about manliness, and seeks to explore the literary, scientific, and social connections between meat-eating, male dominance, and war. Drawing on such sources as butchering texts, cookbooks, Victorian hygiene manuals, and Alice Walker, the author argues in favor of linking feminist and vegetarian theory.

The authors of the concept Health-Related Digital Autonomy have laid the first building block to examine the interactions between artificial intelligence, social media, and depression f...

: This response to the preceding article by Gastmans, Dierckx de Casterle, and Schotsmans challenges the notion of "good care" as the ultimate goal of nursing practice, explores further the possible goals of nursing and how they may be identified, and presents six elements of professional caring along with their related virtues and moral obligations.

A common early narrative that arose as people struggled to cope with their new lives under COVID-19 centered on a platitude about the pandemic being “the great leveler.” But the pretense that we are equally vulnerable—or that we’re “alone together” across lines of race, gender, and class—was a comforting lie. Chronicling the timeline of media talking points seen over the past few months, I argue that social privilege continues to structure the narratives many people use to process life under the (...) pandemic, even while material conditions are much worse for those not in charge of these narratives. At the same time, however, I argue that the pandemic might be setting the stage for genuinely new collective responses to social inequalities, including the long-overdue uprisings inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)

John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris, his memoir about living with Iris Murdoch after the onset of dementia, unsettles models of mind and agency that ignore human relationship, dependency, and the vulnerabilities of the cared for and the carer. Experiencing Iris as ambiguously absent and present while he attentively cares for her, Bayley frames his memoir as an elegy, a reflection on love and loss that conventionally represents two subjects—the author and the one he lost. Bayley’s acts of care and his (...) stories about his wife, both as she was and as she has become, sustain her moral worth as a person. Writing as an elegist, a survivor entitled to be heard, Bayley moves his experience of caring and loss from personal to social realms, from speaker to listener, opening ethical space for consolation and for social responsibility for the vulnerable. (shrink)

A rough categorization of issues in the field of Technology and Society Studies is provided and the kinds of values and value issues under discussion are examined. It is argued that value theory is not sufficiently well-developed to address some of the value issues that arise. Three approaches to values with which the author disagrees are discussed: the atomistic view of values; the ordinary language approach; and, an approach the author calls the "rationality approach". Under the latter, an analysis of (...) value offered by Kurt Baier in "Fact and Value" is criticized. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the possibility that failing to fulfill the Kantian obligation to protect one’s rational nature might actually vitiate future instances of this obligation. I respond to this dilemma by defending a novel interpretation of Kant’s views on the relation between the value we have and the respect we are owed. I argue, contra the received view among Kant scholars, that the feature in virtue of which someone has unconditional and incomparable value is not the same feature (...) in virtue of which she is owed the respect that constrains how she may be treated. So, even though someone who fails to attempt to protect her rational nature fails to respect herself in the right way, and even though this moral failing does make her lose a certain kind of value, her obligations to respect herself do not go away. (shrink)

The main question examined is: How do nurses and other healthcare professionals ensure ethical interprofessional collaboration-in-practice as an everyday practice actuality? Ethical interprofessional collaboration becomes especially relevant and necessary when interprofessional practice decisions are contested. To illustrate, two healthcare scenarios are analyzed through three ethics lenses. Biomedical ethics, relational ethics, and virtue ethics provide different ways of knowing how to be ethical and to act ethically as healthcare professionals. Biomedical ethics focuses on situated, reflective, and nonabsolute principled justification, all things (...) considered; relational ethics on intersubjective, professional, and institutional relations; and virtue ethics on prephilosophical tradition and what it means to be good and to be human embedded in social and political community. Analysis suggests that interprofessional collaboration-in-practice may be more rhetoric than actuality. Key challenges of interprofessional collaboration-in-practice and specific conditions perpetuating dissension and conflict are outlined with specific education and policy recommendations included. (shrink)

This article argues that prevailing accounts of structural injustice, which focus on the way our replication of social practices has unjust consequences for individuals, tend to be insufficiently attentive to the differential power relations within the institutions that structure these practices. For economic exploitation, a structural account would instead locate domination in the operation of the system itself, and would distinguish it from the general constraint characteristic of all social practices as given or inherited. The argument further suggests limits to (...) unitary group agency approaches to corporations, and proposes construing them as artifacts as much as agents, while corporate responsibility would need to better track the division of power between top managers and workers within firms. (shrink)

In this commentary, I question the idea that positive illusions are evolved misbeliefs on the grounds that positive illusions are often maladaptive, are not universal, and may be by-products of existing mechanisms. Further, because different beliefs are adaptive in different situations and cultures, it makes sense to build in a readiness to form beliefs rather than the beliefs themselves.