A Christian analysis of the moral conflicts that exist among physicians and health care institutions requires a detailed treatment of the ethical issues in managed care. To be viable, managed care, as with any system of health care, must be economically sound and morally defensible. While managed care is per se a morally neutral concept, as it is currently practiced in the United States, it is morally dubious at best, and in many instances is antithetical to a Catholic Christian ethics (...) of health care. The moral status of any system of managed care ought to be judged with respect to its congruence with Gospel teachings about the care of the sick, Papal Encyclicals, and the documents of the Second Vatican Council. In this essay, I look at the important conceptual or definitional issues of managed care, assess these concerns over against the source and content of a Catholic ethic of health care, and outline the necessary moral requirements of any licit system of health care. (shrink)

Following up on a 1989 paper on the subject, this essay revisits the question of ethical expertise in the court room. Informed by recent developments in the use of ethics experts, the authors argue 1) that the adversarial nature of court proceedings challenges the integrity of the ethicist's pedagogical role; 2) that the use of ethics experts as normative authorities remains dubious; 3) that clarification of the State's interest in “protecting the ethical integrity of the medical profession” is urgently required; (...) and 4) that the expertise of the ethicist may be more appropriately used in advising the legislature than in influencing the court. (shrink)

The study of a middle school social studies and literacy project this paper addresses occurred in the national capital region of the United States, where perceptions of “patriotism” and immigration policies were the subjects of frequent media reports. With this examination the authors considered one overarching research question: how do middle school students describe and illustrate citizenship when given access to multimodal texts and media (e.g., digital photography and slam poetry)? The authors called on young adolescents to create slam poems (...) with incorporated images to address the question “What does it mean to be a ‘citizen’?”. The authors examined products of this project, which included surveys and slam poems, to address this research question, identifying findings that might inform social studies educators’ practices and curricula. Employing alternative and multimodal texts motivated students to engage with this project and to more candidly share expansive perspectives about what they believe makes a “citizen”. (shrink)

Il saggio introduce le tematiche di questo numero, soffermandosi in parti- colare sulla rilevanza etica e politica del cambiamento climatico. Dopo una rapida spiegazione dell'effetto serra naturale e artificiale, si ripercorrono le teorie che concepiscono il cambiamento climatico come un problema di giustizia distributiva. Secondo alcuni autori queste teorie non sono suffi- cienti per dare strumenti adeguati, perché il cambiamento climatico rappre- senta un problema etico nuovo, che richiede una strumentazione etica ine- dita. Il saggio approfondisce alcune delle caratteristiche nuove (...) dell'etica del cambiamento climatico, soprattutto in relazione all'impatto che le scelte presenti avranno sulla qualità della vita delle generazioni future.It is an introduction to the topic of the present issue of "La società degli in- dividui", dealing with the ethical and political relevance of climate change. After a brief account of the greenhouse effect, various approaches to clima- te change as a matter of distributive justice are considered. According to many authors, these approaches are inadequate, because climate change is a new issue, requiring new tools. The paper focusses on some of the new fea- tures of climate ethics, mainly in connection with the effects that our pre- sent choices may have on the quality of life of future generations. (shrink)

The moral authority for professional ethics in medicine customarily rests in some source external to medicine, i.e., a pre-existing philosophical system of ethics or some form of social construction, like consensus or dialogue. Rather, internal morality is grounded in the phenomena of medicine, i.e., in the nature of the clinical encounter between physician and patient. From this, a philosophy of medicine is derived which gives moral force to the duties, virtues and obligations of physicians qua physicians. Similarly, an ethic specific (...) to the other healing professions, law, teaching or ministry, can be derived from the specific ends to telos of each of these professions, which like medicine, are focused on a special type of human relationship. (shrink)

O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar a cooperação militar entre Brasil e Suriname. Nas últimas décadas a América do Sul tornou-se plataforma estratégica de inserção internacional, modernização da defesa nacional e amadurecimento das relações regionais nos temas de segurança e defesa. Nosso recorte temporal é entre o ano de 1975, ano de independência do Suriname e de inicio de suas relações diplomáticas com o Brasil, até o ano de 2014, final do primeiro mandato da presidente Dilma Rousseff. A metodologia (...) consistiu em análise bibliográfica, levantamento e análise dos acordos de cooperação militar entre o Brasil e Suriname, análise documental e de declarações oficiais, discursos e posicionamentos dos atores sociais e políticos da região sobrea cooperação militar. Nossa análise demonstra que mesmo o Suriname apresentando uma baixa interação diplomática com o Brasil, o país ocupa posição de destaque na cooperação militar. (shrink)

This paper develops a view of the wrongness of personal political corruption. The latter is wrong even when it has no impact or relations with political institutions. The thought is that instances of personal moral corruption of politicians are wrong to voters because they amount to forcing the latter to be authors, namely responsible, of their representatives’ misdeeds. Political corruption is wrong because it violates citizens’ moral integrity, i.e., their entitlement to abstain from immoral deeds, and to be free of (...) responsibility for them. (shrink)

In this paper, two different axiologies of pleasure are attributed to Hutcheson and Mill. Hutcheson endorsed a hedonist axiology, where quality of pleasure works as a still quantitative factor, able to counterbalance other quantitative features of pleasurable mental states - such as intensity and duration. By contrast, in Mill's view of value, the quality of pleasures is the only value-making feature, silencing any contribution from other quantitative elements. Therefore, the presence of certain qualitative characteristics - namely, the connection of certain (...) pleasures with human active faculties - becomes a necessary and sufficient condition of value. Due to this unique role of quality, Mill's axiology opens the way to non-pleasurable experiences being valuable - for non-pleasurable exercises of the human active faculties meet the condition to be valuable states. Thus, Mill's theory of value is declared non-hedonistic - against the recent claims to the contrary put forth by W. Donner. (shrink)

Il saggio introduce le tematiche di questo numero, soffermandosi in particolare sulla rilevanza etica e politica del cambiamento climatico. Dopo una rapida spiegazione dell'effetto serra naturale e artificiale, si ripercorrono le teorie che concepiscono il cambiamento climatico come un problema di giustizia distributiva. Secondo alcuni autori queste teorie non sono sufficienti per dare strumenti adeguati, perché il cambiamento climatico rappresenta un problema etico nuovo, che richiede una strumentazione etica inedita. Il saggio approfondisce alcune delle caratteristiche nuove dell'etica del cambiamento climatico, (...) soprattutto in relazione all'impatto che le scelte presenti avranno sulla qualitÀ della vita delle generazioni future. (shrink)

Le projet de recherche collaborative intitulé TRACS ( Transatlantic Cultures. Cultural Histories of the Atlantic World 18th – 21st Centuries ) vise à élaborer une plate-forme numérique encyclopédique afin de mettre en œuvre une histoire des circulations culturelles dans l’espace atlantique à l’époque contemporaine dans une perspective pluridisciplinaire associant historiens, anthropologues, sociologues, géographes, musicologues, spécialistes de littérature, d’arts, de théâtre ou encore de cinéma. Si le premier objectif du projet est de décrypter l’économie complexe des échanges entre l’Europe, l’Afrique et (...) les Amériques entre la fin du XVIII et le début du XXI siècles en partant du postulat selon lequel le monde atlantique a été un laboratoire privilégié de la mondialisation culturelle, il propose également une réflexion sur les processus identitaires et les frontières qui ont contribué à l’établissement et à la reconfiguration des grandes aires culturelles, ainsi que sur les régimes circulatoires des pratiques, des savoirs et des représentations d’une rive à l’autre de l’océan sur le temps long des 250 dernières années. Pour mener à bien notre démonstration, nous aborderons trois aspects essentiels : le premier tient à la définition même de l’espace atlantique, à ses lignes de forces et à ses frontières ; le second concerne les temporalités de son histoire, longtemps restreinte à l’époque moderne ; le troisième relève des objets étudiés et de la spécificité de l’histoire culturelle, conçue comme une histoire sociale des représentations, des pratiques et des productions symboliques, face à des approches de nature géopolitique et aux Cultural Studies. (shrink)