Now in its sixth edition, this highly popular text covers the range of ethical issues affecting nurses and other healthcare professionals. Authors Simon Robinson and Owen Doody take a holistic and practical approach, focused in the dialogue of ethical decision making and how this connects professional, leadership and governance ethics in the modern healthcare environment. This focuses on the responsibility of professionals and leaders, and the importance of shared responsibility in the practice of healthcare. With a foreword by (...) the eminent medical ethicist Alastair Campbell, the revised edition includes contemporary topics, such as the duty of candour, recent cases, such as the Mid Staffs scandal, and ethical perspectives on vulnerable groups, such as; persons with intellectual/learning disability, dementia and those with an enduring mental illness. It builds on professional identity and personal development as part of ongoing learning, individual and organizational, and provides interactive ways that helps the reader to develop reflective ethical practice. This text aims to enable ethical engagement with the ever changing healthcare environment, and is a must-have for anyone serious about ethics in healthcare. Holistic and practice relevant approach New perspectives on vulnerable groups, such as persons with intellectual/learning disability, dementia and those with an enduring mental illness Descriptive as well as normative ethical theory Promoting dialogue and engagement with practice, practitioners, patients and families Development of professional ethical skills Connecting professional ethics to leadership, governance and social ethics Highly accessible format Case studies/Scenarios presented within chapters and pause for thought exercises to promote dialogue and engagement? Suitable for pre/post registration nurses, students, health care professionals. (shrink)

It is now nearly axiomatic among Platonic scholars that the Timaeus and its unfinished sequel the Critias belong to the last stage of Plato's writings. The Laws is generally held to be wholly or partly a later production. So, by many, is the Philebus, but that is all. Perhaps the privileged status of the Timaeus in the Middle Ages helped to fix the conviction that it embodies Plato's maturest theories.

We report on an interview-based study of decision-making capacity in two classes of patients suffering from depression. Developing a method of second-person hermeneutic phenomenology, we articulate the distinctive combination of temporal agility and temporal inability characteristic of the experience of severely depressed patients. We argue that a cluster of decision-specific temporal abilities is a critical element of decision-making capacity, and we show that loss of these abilities is a risk factor distinguishing severely depressed patients from mildly/moderately depressed patients. We explore (...) the legal and clinical consequences of this result. (shrink)

Organoids and specifically human cerebral organoids (HCOs) are one of the most relevant novelties in the field of biomedical research. Grown either from embryonic or induced pluripotent stem cells, HCOs can be used as in vitro three-dimensional models, mimicking the developmental process and organization of the developing human brain. Based on that, and despite their current limitations, it cannot be assumed that they will never at any stage of development manifest some rudimentary form of consciousness. In the absence of behavioral (...) indicators of consciousness, the theoretical neurobiology of consciousness being applied to unresponsive brain-injured patients can be considered with respect to HCOs. In clinical neurology, it is difficult to discern a capacity for consciousness in unresponsive brain-injured patients who provide no behavioral indicators of consciousness. In such scenarios, a validated neurobiological theory of consciousness, which tells us what the neural mechanisms of consciousness are, could be used to identify a capacity for consciousness. Like the unresponsive patients that provide a diagnostic difficulty for neurologists, HCOs provide no behavioral indicators of consciousness. Therefore, this article discusses how three prominent neurobiological theories of consciousness apply to human cerebral organoids. From the perspective of the Temporal Circuit Hypothesis, the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, and the Integrated Information Theory, we discuss what neuronal structures and functions might indicate that cerebral organoids have a neurobiological capacity to be conscious. (shrink)

This essay develops, within the terms of the recent New York Declaration, an account of the shared responsibility of states to refugees and of how the character of that responsibility effects the ways in which it can be fairly shared. However, it also moves beyond the question of the general obligations that states owe to refugees to consider ways in which refugee choices and refugee voice can be given appropriate standing with the global governance of refuge. It offers an argument (...) for the normative significance of refugee’s reasons for choosing states of asylum and linked this to consideration of a refugee matching system and to refugee quota trading conceived as responsibility-trading, before turning to the issue of the inclusion of refugee voice in relation to the justification of the norms of refugee governance and in relation to the institutions and practices of refugee governance through which those norms are given practical expression. (shrink)

This article addresses two central topics in normative debates on transnational citizenship: the inclusion of resident non-citizens and of non-resident citizens within the demos. Through a critical review of the social membership (Carens, Rubio-Marin) and stakeholder (Baubock) principles, it identifies two problems within these debates. The first is the antinomy of incorporation, namely, the point that there are compelling arguments both for the mandatory naturalization of permanent residents and for making naturalization a voluntary process. The second is the arbitrary demos (...) problem and concerns who determines whether expatriate voting rights are granted (and on what terms). The argument developed provides a way of dissolving the first problem (and defending the proposed solution against possible objections) and resolving the second problem. In doing so it provides a defensible normative basis for the political theory of transnational citizenship. (shrink)

This essay argues that whereas ‘analytic’ political philosophy is focussed on generating reasons that are oriented to the issue of articulating norms of justice, legitimacy and so on, that guide political judgements about institutions and/or forms of conduct; ‘Continental’ political philosophy is oriented to critically assessing the practices of reasoning that characterise our social and political institutions and forms of conduct as well as our first-order normative reflection on them. It explores the distinction between the two orientations in terms of, (...) what are called, their ‘structural problematics’: the guidance problem and the critique problem, before considering briefly ways in which they may be combined. (shrink)

This paper addresses republican conditions of legitimacy for the constitution of the civic statuses of migrants. It identifies two legitimacy tests to which any civic status is subject, namely, that it does not make its bearers more vulnerable to the arbitrary exercise of private or public power and that the constitution of the person as bearer of this status is not itself the product of an arbitrary exercise of public power . It is argued that R1 puts significant constraints on (...) what can be legitimate migrant statuses and R2 links republicanism to cosmopolitanism in terms of a basic norm in respect of the production and allocation of civic statuses in that those who are subject to such a regime should have the effective power to ‘shape and contest’ the rules of this regime. (shrink)

This article argues that the practical difficulties and normative dilemmas at stake in the European refugee crisis as a crisis of EU integration extend beyond refugee policies into what we may call ‘the citizenship regime’ of the European Union in ways that are consequential for refugees, member states, and the European Union. It advances arguments for the relatively rapid access to citizenship of refugees, demonstrates that this norm has at least some acknowledgment in the policies of EU member states and (...) considers what further differentiation of refugees from other classes of migrant might be a part of developing a just and legitimate Common European Asylum Regime. It argues that there are some reasons to favour a CEAS in which refugees receive EU citizenship prior to national citizenship in a member state. (shrink)

Given the ever-present subject of consciousness wherever consciousness is, it is peculiar that consciousness researchers often mention mental states as if they are conscious independently of being the conscious states of someone [1, p. 132]. We refer to visual perceptions that become conscious, when in reality no one has ever studied mere conscious visual perceptions. What are studied are visual perceptions belonging to conscious human or animal subjects; it is the subjects who are conscious of visual stimuli, not the visual (...) perceptions. I do not know all the reasons why conscious subjects are rarely mentioned in consciousness science, but one could be pragmatic. Explaining the mysterious jump from the nonconscious nuts and bolts of neurons to the aurora borealis of consciousness is a hard problem. But it is an easy problem compared to explaining the emergence of a single conscious subject from the human brain’s 86 billion neurons [cf. 5]. Perhaps it is more practically realistic to solve the less hard problem before attempting to solve the harder hard problem. On the other hand, if we ignore a necessary condition for the presence of consciousness, our explanations of it could be plagued by inadequacy. And how can we explain our whole data set regarding consciousness if we neglect the most fundamental aspect of the data? (shrink)

The Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) ontology is an important reference for applications dealing with chemical annotations and data mining. Modeling errors and inconsistencies in th...

Acknowledgments1. If Liberalism is a Faith, What Becomes of the Separation of Church and State?2. Pragmatism, Liberalism, and the Quarrel between Science and Religion3. Rorty's Repudiation of Epistemology4. Rortian Irony and the "De-divinization" of Liberalism5. Religion and Rawls's Freestanding Liberalism6. Stanley Fish and the Demise of the Separation of Church and State7. Fish, Locke, and Religious Neutrality8. Reason, Indifference, and the Aim of Religious FreedomAppendix: A Reply to Stanley FishNotesBibliographyIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Hume said that reason alone cannot motivate and that passions are required to produce volitions and actions. It is argued that the widely, though not universally, held “Humean” view of motivation—that beliefs require desires to motivate actions—does not accurately reflect Hume’s own view. The author argues here that beliefs, especially beliefs about pleasure, do motivate. But beliefs are produced by probable reasoning. And this seems to imply that reason alone does motivate, i.e., produces, via beliefs, volitions and actions. It is (...) argued that the seeming inconsistency that appears to result is only apparent. An interpretation of what Hume means by “reason alone” is provided. (shrink)

This paper examines Nuti’s accounts of structural injustice and historical injustice in the light of a political dilemma that confronted Young’s work on structure injustice. The dilemma emerges from a paradox that can be stated simply: justly addressing structural injustice would require that those subject to structural injustice enjoy the kind of privileged position of decision-making power that their being subject to structural injustice denies them. The dilemma thus concerns how to justly address structural injustice. I argue that Nuti’s account (...) is currently unable to provide an adequate theorization of how to address this dilemma because it lacks an account of political solidarity, but also that her account provides important resources for dissolving a dispute between two competing theories of solidarity in a way that facilitates the articulation of an account of political solidarity that is adequate to addressing the political dilemma. (shrink)

In this commentary on Ken Gemes's “The Biology of Evil,” I endorse the general reading of Nietzsche's philosophical project proposed by Gemes while contesting his account of Nietzsche's rhetorical engagement with degeneration theory. In particular, I show that Nietzsche is mobilizing a rhetoric of degeneration that invokes, and partially subverts, the picture of degeneration proposed by Caesare Lombroso in which genius and degeneration are linked in a way that enables a positive view of degeneration as a source of social transformation. (...) Focusing on Nietzsche's rhetorical use of the figure of Napoleon in the Genealogy, I argue that Nietzsche's engagement with the tropes of Lombroso's theory provides support for Gemes's claim concerning the ethical aim of Nietzsche's project in a way that his own account of Nietzsche and degeneration cannot. (shrink)

This essay analyses Tully's approach to political philosophy and his arguments concerning the constitutional recognition of cultural diversity. It contextualizes Tully's approach within a discussion of Wittgenstein, showing how this approach illustrates and overcomes the limitations of analytic approaches to political philosophy. It then turns to show how this approach elucidates the character and significance of struggles for cultural recognition. The essay considers the form of civic education exemplified by this approach and some possible criticisms of Tully's arguments, before concluding (...) with a set of reflections on the tone of political philosophy. (shrink)

Until recently, philosophical scholarship has not been kind to Hume’s arguments in “Of scepticism with regard to reason” (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1.4.1). [1] Reid gives the negative arguments a pretty rough ride, though in the end he agrees with Hume’s conclusion that reason cannot be defended by reason.[2] Stove’s comment that the argument is “not merely defective, but one of the worst arguments ever to impose itself on a man of genius” (Stove 1973), while extreme, is not untypical. (...) Many important books on Hume (e.g. Stroud 1977) simply ignore it, though this may be because it is difficult to find any trace of the arguments in the Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding.[3] Furthermore, when attention was paid to the arguments, it was devoted mainly to the second of the two negative arguments Hume puts forward, and that argument was held to contain an elementary mistake concerning beliefs about beliefs (McNabb 1951). (shrink)

For phenomenological psychopathologists an important methodological question is which philosopher, or philosophical corpus, one is going to draw on to help organize and illuminate raw psychopathological data. For the main phenomenological psychopathologists of the past this involved selecting from among phenomenological philosophers and keeping close to them to varying degrees. For Minkowski it was Bergson, for von Gebsattel it was Scheler, and for Binswanger it was Heidegger and then Husserl. A question that arises is what makes the choice of philosopher (...) non-arbitrary?A pragmatist, or pluralist, answer to this question which I tend to favor is that psychopathologists... (shrink)

This is an examination of the effect that postmodernism has had upon sociological thought. Individual chapters address the topics of class, gender, race, criminology, deviance, law, culture, sexuality, emotion, medicine, science, and technology.

This article draws on ethnographic data from a field leading university licensing office to document and explain a key step in the process of institutionalization, the abstraction of standardized rules and procedures from idiosyncratic efforts to collectively resolve pressing problems. I present and analyze cases where solutions to complicated quandaries become abstract bits of professional knowledge and demonstrate that in some circumstances institutionalized practices can contribute to the flexibility of expert reasoning and decision-making. In this setting, expertise is rationalized in (...) response to institutional tensions between academic and business approaches to deal making and professional tensions between relational and legal approaches to negotiation. Abstraction and formalization contribute both to the convergence and stability of routines and to their improvisational use in professional work. Close attention to these processes in a strategic research setting sheds new light on an interesting tension in sociological theories of the professions while contributing to the development of a micro-level, social constructivist institutional theory. (shrink)

The ethical authority carried in the conventions of fairness and human well-being has been widely adopted under the idea of “moral economy,” forming an eclectic and interdisciplinary debate. Significant, though external to this debate, is a corpus of medieval thought which exhibits a fundamental interest in legitimate market protocols, and the political rights and obligations of agents in relation to the common good of the community. This article asserts the imperative status of a customary basis for understanding not just the (...) analytic version of moral economy but the legacy contained in what might be termed the “the moral economy of Aquinas.”. (shrink)

Mental causation is vitally important to the integrated information theory (IIT), which says consciousness exists since it is causally efficacious. While it might not be directly apparent, metaphysical commitments have consequential entailments concerning the causal efficacy of consciousness. Commitments regarding the ontology of consciousness and the nature of causation determine which problem(s) a view of consciousness faces with respect to mental causation. Analysis of mental causation in contemporary philosophy of mind has brought several problems to the fore: the alleged lack (...) of psychophysical laws, the causal exclusion problem, and the causal pairing problem. This article surveys the threat each problem poses to IIT based on the different metaphysical commitments IIT theorists might make. Distinctions are made between what I call reductive IIT, non-reductive IIT, and non-physicalist IIT, each of which make differing metaphysical commitments regarding the ontology of consciousness and nature of causation. Subsequently, each problem pertaining to mental causation is presented and its threat, or lack thereof, to each version of IIT is considered. While the lack of psychophysical laws appears unthreatening for all versions, reductive IIT and non-reductive IIT are seriously threatened by the exclusion problem, and it is difficult to see how they could overcome it while maintaining a commitment to the causal closure principle. Yet, non-physicalist IIT denies the principle but is therefore threatened by the pairing problem, to which I have elsewhere provided a response that is briefly outlined here. This problem also threatens non-reductive IIT, but unlike non-physicalist IIT it lacks an evident response. The ultimate aim of this survey is to provide a roadmap for IIT theorists through the maze of mental causation, by clarifying which commitments lead to which problems, and how they might or might not be overcome. Such a survey can aid IIT theorists as they further develop and hone the metaphysical commitments of IIT. (shrink)

This paper deploys Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory to examine the dispute over intellectual property protection and global HIV/aids medicines access. Over the 1980s and 1990s, major pharmaceutical companies and minority world governments successfully crafted a strong patent protection regime, institutionalized in the World Trade Organization's intellectual property rules. In the early 2000s, a transnational civil society campaign challenged this regime, positioning patents at the centre of a highly publicized dispute. This dispute has been retrospectively identified as a turning point (...) in medicines access discourse, with the 2001–2003 period dubbed the ‘golden window’ for expanded global HIV/aids medicines access. However, this ‘window’ has also been critiqued as an unsustainable aberration to a continuing hegemonic regime that prioritizes patent protection, to the detriment of equitable global medicines access. This paper draws on both political economy analyses and discourse theoretical concepts to examine the processes of rupture and suture in HIV/aids medicines access discourse. (shrink)

In this article I argue that a critical theory of whiteness is necessary, though not sufficient, to the formulation of an adequate explanatory account of the mechanisms of racial oppression in the modern world. In order to explain how whiteness underwrites systems of racial oppression and how it is reproduced, the central functional properties of whiteness are identified. I propose that understanding whiteness as a structuring property of racialized social systems best explains these functional properties. Given the variety of conceptions (...) of whiteness in the literature, the several uses of the term are analysed and it is shown that there is a unifying concept underlying these various senses of whiteness. Lastly, some of the implications of this account of whiteness for anti-racist engagement are considered. Key Words: critical theory • Anthony Giddens • Jürgen Habermas • race • racial contract • racism • social structure • white supremacy • whiteness. (shrink)

Both the pragmatic logic of social critique and the idea of a critical social theory presuppose the possibility of distinguishing progressive from regressive forms of social change. Thus, a condition of adequacy of social critique in general, and of critical social theory in particular, is the theoretical capacity to identify progressive social change. I begin this study by showing that, since it incorporates a theory of social evolution, Habermas's conception of critical social theory satisfies this condition. ;Habermas's theory of social (...) evolution, however, is a source of much misunderstanding in the literature. I attempt to clarify the theory with a careful reconstruction of its concepts and fundamental theses, and by systematizing the theory as a whole. The central thesis of the theory of social evolution that functions to identify progressive change is that the logic and the content of social change can be distinguished, and that we can rationally reconstruct the developmental logic of the normative structures of societies. I analyze the concept of developmental logic and defend it against some common objections, including the objection that the theory draws a false analogy between the structures of individual maturation and social rationalization. This 'ontogenetic fallacy' is not committed, I argue, because Habermas translates only the formal features of the concept of developmental logic from its genesis in psychology to social theory. ;I conclude by arguing that Habermas's theory of social evolution does entail an adequate conception of progress, but that it is insufficiently differentiated. That is, Habermas's theory explains progress in each of the dimensions of cognitive knowledge and moral insight; but it lacks an explanation of progress in the dimension of expressive self-realization. Drawing upon the conceptual resources of Habermas's theory, I show that it can account for this dimension if it also includes a notion of expressive action that is pre-discursive. (shrink)

Hume's negative argument about probable reasoning is sometimes called the problem of induction. The modern version of that argument is centrally concerned with the warrant of probable reasoning and the justification of the beliefs that result from such reasoning. It is argued here that Hume is more concerned with the mechanism that produces such beliefs, and that his problem is more one of explanation than justification. What does Hume mean by raising the question whether we are determined by reason in (...) making the inference from a present impression to an unobserved idea? If we were determined by reason, something, such as the idea of necessary connection or the principle of uniformity, would have to serve as the intermediary via which we get from the impression to the idea. But no such idea or principle is available to us prior to our engaging in probable reasoning. So inferences or reasonings from the observed to the unobserved are not explained by an appeal to the faculty of reason. The point about not being determined by reason does not show that such inferences, or the beliefs we thus come to hold, are unreasonable. It shows that our coming to have such beliefs is not explained by an appeal to the proper functioning of the faculty of reason. (shrink)

Fisher recognized that the evolution of social insect colonies needed explaining, a point which Charles Darwin had avoided discussing in detail. Fisher, in his 1930 book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, outlined in detail how eusociality could evolve, and developed a verbal model by connecting selection on fecundity with the sterility of workers. Fisher saw social insect colonies as harmonious units, in contrast to human societies that exhibit intra-communal conflict. Fisher’s development of the model was strongly influenced by his (...) correspondence with Leonard Darwin, and so I call it the Fisher-Darwin model. However, Fisher was not influenced by Lamarckian views on the evolution of social insects that were common at that time. The Fisher-Darwin model presages almost exactly the mathematical model recently proposed by Nowak and colleagues. (shrink)

Hume's treatment of scepticism with regard to reason is analogous to his account of probable reasoning. In neither case is Hume concerned with the justification of beliefs or the warrant of reason as much as with the explanation of the presence of beliefs. In his account of probable reasoning, the issue was the origin of beliefs; in his account of scepticism with regard to reason, the issue is the retention of beliefs in the face of sceptical arguments. The sceptical arguments (...) threaten to lessen the degree of force and vivacity characteristic of our beliefs to the extent that they are in danger of becoming mere ideas and not beliefs at all. We know, as a matter of fact, that this result does not obtain, and Hume attempts to explain this by an appeal to a feature of his account of reasoning: lengthy chains of abstruse reasoning have little effect on us. Hume considers his ability to respond to these sceptical arguments to be a vindication of his theory of belief. (shrink)