The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly become an era-defining challenge for the entire world. It has implications not only in the public health sector but also in the global economy and political landscape. The prevention strategy that has been followed in Sri Lanka is unique. Early action taken by the government and the ministry of health, being one of pre-emptive quarantining and isolation of suspected contacts even before they developed symptoms, was vital to contain the spread of the disease. During the (...) early phase, a nationwide lockdown in the form of a curfew was imposed which helped mitigate the spread of the virus. However, due to several lapses, there was a threat of community transmission; this was swiftly brought under control through ongoing government interventions. Thus, strict social/physical distancing measures enforced by the government, together with an increase in testing capacity, prevented widespread community transmission. Strictly containing the outbreaks as and when they were identified made it easier to bring the spread under control through contact tracing. In this article, we give an account of the strategy taken by Sri Lanka to mitigate the pandemic and comment on the lessons learned concerning the ethical responses to the COVID-19 crisis. (shrink)

OBJECTIVES: To analyse the attitudes of medical personnel towards terminally ill patients and their right to be fully informed. DESIGN: Self-administered questionnaire composed of 56 closed questions. SETTING: Three general hospitals and eleven health centres in Granada (Spain). The sample comprised 168 doctors and 207 nurses. RESULTS: A high percentage of medical personnel (24.1%) do not think that informing the terminally ill would help them face their illness with greater serenity. Eighty-four per cent think the patient's own home is the (...) best place to die: 8.9% of the subjects questioned state that the would not like to be informed of an incurable illness. CONCLUSION: In our opinion any information given should depend on the patient's personality, the stage of the illness and family circumstances. Our study confirms that a hospital is not the ideal environment for attending to the needs of the terminally ill and their families. (shrink)

It is argued that organ donation from a patient to the patient's physician is ethically dubious because donation decisions will be inappropriately influenced and the negative public perceptions will result in more harm than good. It is suggested that to protect the perception of the physician–patient relationship, avoid cynicism about medicine’s attitude to patient welfare and maintain trust in the medical profession, a new professional boundary should be established to prevent physicians from receiving organs for transplantation donated by their patients.

Measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) has been fundamental to our understanding of how language is encoded in the brain. One particular ERP response, the N400 response, has been especially influential as an index of lexical and semantic processing. However, there remains a lack of consensus on the interpretation of this component. Resolving this issue has important consequences for neural models of language comprehension. Here we show that evidence bearing on where the N400 response is generated provides key insights into what it (...) reflects. A neuroanatomical model of semantic processing is used as a guide to interpret the pattern of activated regions in functional MRI, magnetoencephalography and intracranial recordings that are associated with contextual semantic manipulations that lead to N400 effects. (shrink)

In the past 40 years, a global shift has taken place towards a constellation of values known as “expansive values”, which de-emphasize pursuits of money, possessions, and status, and instead focus on quality of life and humanistic goals. This study investigated what students holding expansive values desired in business school course content and student quality of life, and how these preferences differed from students holding materialistic values. Results revealed a number of different factors that were associated only with expansive values, (...) though on a few factors the two student values cohorts shared similar preferences or had inverse preferences. One clear implication of this study is that business schools need to consider offering more ethics classes in order to satisfy the growing number of students with expansive values. (shrink)

A critical discussion is provided of three central assumptions underlying Nunez's approach to modeling cortical activity. A plea is made for neurophysiologically realistic models involving nonlinearities, multiple time scales, and stochasticity.

Girotto and Legrenzi's 1993 facilitation effect for their SARS version of Wason s THOG problem a disjunctive reasoning task was examined. The effect was not replicated when the standard THOG problem instructions were used in Experiments 1 and 2. However, in Experiment 3 when Girotto and Legrenzi's precise instructions were used, facilitation was observed. Experiment 4 further investigated the role of the type of instructions in the observed facilitation. The results suggest that such facilitation may result from attentional factors rather (...) than the use of a combinatorial analysis in the problem. (shrink)

A. Kuznetsov considered a logic which extended intuitionistic propositional logic by adding a notion of 'irreflexive modality'. We describe an extension of Kuznetsov's logic having the following properties: (a) it is the unique maximal conservative (over intuitionistic propositional logic) extension of Kuznetsov's logic; (b) it determines a new unary logical connective w.r.t. Novikov's approach, i.e., there is no explicit expression within the system for the additional connective; (c) it is axiomatizable by means of one simple additional axiom scheme.

The collected essays and consensus statements of the second round of the National Evangelical-Catholic Dialogue, and the second book of the series on Evangelicals and Catholics in dialogue. The essays address the Christian ideal of life lived in pursuit of the good that is God, and the witness and imitation of God's action in Christ, as a pathway to fruitful dialogue between Catholics and Evangelicals.

1. Etica e coscienza. Etica, scienza e tecnica -- 2. Etica e cultura. Etica e politica -- 3. Etica ed economia. Problemi de etica.

By ‘moral liberty’ Reid means, not freedom to act, but freedom to choose, or to decide. And the choosing he is talking of is an internal something, not the external performance that choosing often is, where it is the executing of one of a number of options—as in the response to “Choose any card from this deck.” Non-human animals sometimes act voluntarily, but those actions “seem to be invariably determined by the passion, or appetite, or affection, or habit, which is (...) strongest at the time.” A voluntary action is for Reid a willed action, i.e., an action done with an object. Even if some animals sometimes perform such actions, they have no power to determine their own wills, no “power of self-government.” Moral liberty is the liberty of a moral agent, his power over the determinations of his will, which requires “not only a conception of what he wills, but some degree of practical judgment or reason.” Moral liberty, then, is “the Liberty of Moral Agents, who are capable of acting well or ill, wisely or foolishly.” Unless we are in that sense free, nothing that we do can be the proper object of blame or approval. (shrink)

In the article the problem of transformation of the information received by the user on the Internet into his knowledge is investigated. The paper uses the main special scientific and logical research methods used in the social and humanitarian sciences. At the same time, the methods of systematic and value-worldview analysis of the phenomena of the spiritual world of a person are distinguished by the degree of significance, which allow us to study the problem of the dialectic of knowledge and (...) information on the Internet not in isolation, but in connection with the main phenomena of the spiritual life of people, taking into account the priority of value-worldview structures. The goal of the work is to find a priority factor that provides a higher degree of accuracy in the transformation of information from the Internet into human knowledge. It is shown that the nature of the world wide web to a certain extent complicates the process of translating information coming to a person into his knowledge. It is concluded that the condition for the transformation of information received by the user on the Internet is the cognitive activity of a person, due primarily to the development of its value and ideological sphere. If the cognizing person has sufficiently developed and stable value – ideological foundations of personality, he successfully realizes himself as a developing subject, an active participant in knowledge. On the contrary, insufficiently stable value-worldview sphere can lead to passive perception of information by the individual, adaptation to reality, simplification of personality. Information from the Internet in the most adequate form is transformed into a person’s knowledge on the basis of his own cognitive activity, in the presence of intellectual and volitional capabilities for verifying the information available on the Network. (shrink)

A general practice research project on ethics is underway at the University of New South Wales, funded by GPEP. Ethical issues, as defined and explored by general practitioners and consumers, are being examined across four areas of Sydney.So far, telephone interviews have been conducted with a random sample of general practitioners. Face-to-face interviews have been conducted with 107 consumers, randomly sampled using ABS collection district information. Focus groups have been formed to discuss acceptable solutions to GP and consumer identified ethical (...) issues. This report will report on some preliminary findings to date and will explore professional and consumer roles in the formation of ethical solutions. (shrink)