This article systematically reviews studies investigating the effect of three operationalizations of complexity in emotion experience on situat...

It is shown how, under certain circumstances and within Bishop‐style constructive mathematics, one can construct a product of two a‐frames (the structures underlying the constructive theory of apartness on frames).

Clinical ethics training programs are responsible for preparing their trainees to be competent ethics consultants worthy of the trust of patients, families, surrogates, and healthcare professionals. While the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) offers a certification examination for healthcare ethics consultants, no tools exist for the formal evaluation of ethics trainees to assess their progress toward competency. Medical specialties accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) use milestones to report trainees’ progress along a continuum of (...) professional development as a means of “operationalizing and implementing” medical competencies. Utilizing the Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultation and the ACGME and American Board of Pediatrics’ (ABP) Pediatric Milestones Project, we developed milestones for 17 subcompetencies in clinical ethics consultation and academic bioethics. As the field of clinical ethics becomes more standardized, such tools will be needed to promote the development of robust training programs and to certify that their graduates are competent practitioners. (shrink)

It is well known that in Bishop-style constructive mathematics, the closure of the union of two subsets of ℝ is ‘not’ the union of their closures. The dual situation, involving the complement of the closure of the union, is investigated constructively, using completeness of the ambient space in order to avoid any application of Markov's Principle.

Jamgön Mipam (1846–1912) is one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of Tibet.

Thousands of U.S. parents choose to refuse or delay the administration of selected vaccines to their children each year, and some choose not to vaccinate their children at all. While most physicians continue to provide care to these families over time, using each visit as an opportunity to educate and encourage vaccination, an increasing number of physicians are choosing to dismiss these families from their practice unless they agree to vaccinate their children. This paper will examine this emerging trend along (...) with the reasons given by those who advocate such an approach. I will argue that the strategy of refusing to allow families into a clinic unless they agree to vaccinate their children is misguided, and the arguments for doing so fail to stand up to close scrutiny. Such a strategy does not benefit the child or the health of the community, and may have a negative impact on both. Furthermore, some of the arguments in support of dismissal policies ignore the importance of professional obligation and appear to favor self-interest over the interest of the patient. (shrink)

The best interest standard is the threshold most frequently employed by physicians and ethics consultants in challenging a parent’s refusal to provide consent for a child’s medical care. In this article, I will argue that the best interest standard has evolved to serve two different functions, and that these functions differ sufficiently that they require separate standards. While the best interest standard is appropriate for choosing among alternative treatment options for children, making recommendations to parents, and making decisions on behalf (...) of a child when the legal decision makers are either unable to make a decision or are in dispute, a different standard is required for deciding when to seek state interference with parental decision-making authority. I will suggest that the harm principle provides a more appropriate threshold for determining when to seek state intervention than the best interest standard. (shrink)

The case of Ashley X involved a young girl with profound and permanent developmental disability who underwent growth attenuation using high-dose estrogen, a hysterectomy, and surgical removal of her breast buds. Many individuals and groups have been critical of the decisions made by Ashley's parents, physicians, and the hospital ethics committee that supported the decision. While some of the opposition has been grounded in distorted facts and misunderstandings, others have raised important concerns. The purpose of this paper is to provide (...) a brief review of the case and the issues it raised, then address 25 distinct substantive arguments that have been proposed as reasons that Ashley's treatment might be unethical. We conclude that while some important concerns have been raised, the weight of these concerns is not sufficient to consider the interventions used in Ashley's case to be contrary to her best interests, nor are they sufficient to preclude similar use of these interventions in the future for carefully selected patients who might also benefit from them. (shrink)

Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Nature is a philosophical overview of Tibetan Buddhist thought. Charting the different ways Buddhist traditions in Tibet configure the relationship between Madhyamaka and Mind-Only, Duckworth shows how these configurations inform the shape of distinct contemplative practices.

It is argued that Hellman's arguments purporting to demonstrate that constructive mathematics cannot cope with unbounded operators on a Hilbert space are seriously flawed, and that there is no evidence that his thesis is correct.

Robertson's earlier work, The New Renaissance projected the likely future impact of computers in changing our culture. Phase Change builds on and deepens his assessment of the role of the computer as a tool driving profound change by examining the role of computers in changing the face of the sciences and mathematics. He shows that paradigm shifts in understanding in science have generally been triggered by the availability of new tools, allowing the investigator a new way of seeing into questions (...) that had not earlier been amenable to scientific probing. (shrink)

Buddhist traditions understand emptiness in various ways, and two streams of interpretation, “self-emptiness” and “other-emptiness” , have emerged in Tibet that help bring into focus the extent to which interpretations diverge.1 In contrast to self-emptiness, other-emptiness does not refer to a phenomenon’s lack of its own essence; it refers to the ultimate reality’s lack of all that it is not. Rather than claiming the universality of self-emptiness , proponents of other-emptiness assert another way to understand emptiness with regard to the (...) ultimate . These two interpretations of emptiness—as ground and as groundless .. (shrink)

In the informal setting of Bishop-style constructive reverse mathematics we discuss the connection between the antithesis of Specker’s theorem, Ishihara’s principle BD-N, and various types of equicontinuity. In particular, we prove that the implication from pointwise equicontinuity to uniform sequential equicontinuity is equivalent to the antithesis of Specker’s theorem; and that, for a family of functions on a separable metric space, the implication from uniform sequential equicontinuity to uniform equicontinuity is equivalent to BD-N.

With each novel infectious disease outbreak, there is scholarly attention to healthcare providers’ obligation to assume personal risk while they care for infected patients. While most agree that healthcare providers have a duty to assume some degree of risk, the extent of this obligation remains uncertain. Furthermore, these analyses rarely examine healthcare institutions’ obligations during these outbreaks. As a result, there is little practical guidance for healthcare institutions that are forced to weigh whether or when to exclude healthcare providers from (...) providing care or allow them to opt out from providing care to protect themselves. This article uses the COVID-19 pandemic to examine the concept of risk and the professional duties of both healthcare providers and healthcare institutions, and proposes a framework that can be used to make concrete institutional policy choices. This framework should be a useful tool for any hospital, clinic, or health agency that must make these choices during the current pandemic and beyond. (shrink)

The nature of modern constructive mathematics, and its applications, actual and potential, to classical and quantum physics, are discussed.

Thirty years ago, Buchanan and Brock distinguished between guidance principles and interference principles in the setting of surrogate decision making on behalf of children and incompetent adult patients. They suggested that the best interest standard could serve as a guidance principle, but was insufficient as an interference principle. In this issue of The Journal of Clinical Ethics, Ross argues that the best interest standard can serve as neither a guidance nor interference principle for decision making on behalf of children, but (...) that her model of constrained parental autonomy can serve as both. I will argue that Buchanan and Brock were correct that a single model or standard cannot serve as both a guidance and interference principle in pediatrics and that the best interest standard is a sufficient guidance principle. The harm principle fulfills the conditions necessary for an interference principle, at least insofar as deciding when state intervention to interfere with parental decision making is justified. (shrink)

Continuing the study of apartness in lattices, begun in [8], this paper deals with axioms for a product a-frame and with their consequences. This leads to a reasonable notion of proximity in an a-frame, abstracted from its counterpart in the theory of set-set apartness.

We propose a natural definition of what it means in a constructive context for a Banach space to be reflexive, and then prove a constructive counterpart of the Milman-Pettis theorem that uniformly convex Banach spaces are reflexive.

The minimax theorem of matrix game theory is examined from a constructive point of view. It is then shown that the existence of solutions for matrix games cannot be proved constructively, but that a 2-by-2 game with at most one solution has a constructible solution.

We examine, from a constructive perspective, the relation between the complements of S, T, and S ∩ T in X, where X is either a metric space or a normed linear space. The fundamental question addressed is: If x is distinct from each element of S ∩ T, if s ϵ S, and if t ϵ T, is x distinct from s or from t? Although the classical answer to this question is trivially affirmative, constructive answers involve Markov's principle and (...) the completeness of metric spaces. (shrink)

The glueing of (sequentially, pointwise, or uniformly) continuous functions that coincide on the intersection of their closed domains is examined in the light of Bishop-style constructive analysis. This requires us to pay attention to the way that the two domains intersect.