Moral conflicts occur in theories that involve more than one principle. I examine basic ways of dealing with moral dilemmas in medical ethics and in ethics generally, and propose a different approach based on a principle I call the "mutuality principle". It is offered as an addition to Tom Beauchamp and James Childress' principlism. The principle calls for the mutual enhancement of basic moral values. After explaining the principle and its strengths, I test it by way of an examination of (...) three responses—in the recent Festschrift for Dr Raanon Gillon—to a case involving parental refusal of a blood transfusion. The strongest response is the one that comes closest to the requirements of the mutuality principle but yet falls short. I argue that the mutuality principle provides an explicit future orientation in principlism and gives it greater moral coherence. (shrink)

We propose a new picture of nature in which there are only two fundamental universal constantsè ē (≡e/c) andh(≡ħ/c). Our theory is developed within the framework of a new four-dimensional symmetry which is constructed on the basis of the Poincaré-Einstein principle of relativity for the laws of physics and the Newtonian concept of time. We obtain a new space-light transformation law, a velocity-addition law, and so on. In this symmetry scheme, the speed of light is constant and is completely relative. (...) The new theory is logically self-consistent, and it moreover is in agreement with all previously established experimental facts, such as the “lifetime dilatation” of unstable particles, the Michelson-Morley experiment, etc. There is a difference relative to the usual theory, though, in that our theory predicts a new law for the Dopplerfrequency shift, which can be tested experimentally by measuring the second-order frequency shift. (shrink)

Philosophy is experiencing a resurgence of property (PD) and generic substance dualism (SD). One important argument for SD that has played a role in this resurgence is some version of a modal argument. Until recently, premise (3) of the argument (Possibly, I exist, and no wholly physical objects exist.) has garnered most of the attention by critics. However, more recently, the focus has also been on (2) (Wholly physical objects are essentially, wholly, and intrinsically physical and wholly spiritual substances are (...) essentially, wholly, and intrinsically immaterial.). Andrew Bailey has provided one of the best criticisms of (2) on offer. In what follows, I present and clarify one form of the argument and defend premise (2) by responding to important defeaters proffered by Andrew Bailey and his contingent physicalism. (shrink)

Context The conduct of medical research led by Northern countries in developing countries raises ethical questions. The assessment of research protocols has to be twofold, with a first reading in the country of origin and a second one in the country where the research takes place. This reading should benefit from an independent local ethical review of protocols. Consequently, ethics committees for medical research are evolving in Africa. Objective To investigate the process of establishing ethics committees and their independence. Method (...) Descriptive study of 25 African countries and two North American countries. Data were recorded by questionnaire and interviews. Two visits of ethics committee meetings were conducted on the ground: over a period of 3 months in Kigali (Rwanda) and 2 months in Washington DC (USA). Results 22 countries participated in this study, 20 from Africa and two from North America. The response rate was 80%. 75% of local African committees developed into national ethics committees. During the last 5 years, these national committees have grown on a structural level. The circumstances of creation and the general context of underdevelopment remain the major challenges in Africa. Their independence could not be ensured without continuous training and efficient funding mechanisms. Institutional ethics committees are well established in USA and in Canada, whereas ethics committees in North America are weakened by the institutional affiliation of their members. Conclusion The process of establishing ethics committees could affect their functioning and compromise their independence in some African countries and in North America. (shrink)

We discuss the symmetry basis of unified field theories, i.e., the generalized concept of local gauge symmetry, and its physical implications. The generalized Ward-Takahashi identities and the explicit constraints among renormalization constants are derived by using the path integral in a specific model. These constraints are confirmed at the one-loop level.

Like theories of punishment, theories of reverse discrimination can usefully be divided into forward-looking ones and backward-looking ones. One example of the former type of theory is Dworkin's, who defends the policy on the ground that it will produce ‘a more equal society’. Another is Sher's, who defends it on the ground that it increases equality of opportunity. This essay is an examination of the latter type of theory. Compensatory discrimination is related, then, to discrimination thus: discrimination is the genus, (...) of which reverse discrimination is a species, of which compensatory discrimination is a sub-species. It will be convenient to proceed by examining successively the ideas of discrimination, of compensation, and of compensatory discrimination. (shrink)

Objectives: The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between a physician’s subjective mortality prediction and the level of confidence with which that mortality prediction is made.Design and participants: The study is a prospective cohort of patients less than 18 years of age admitted to a tertiary Paediatric Intensive Care Unit at a University Children’s Hospital with a minimum length of ICU stay of 10 h. Paediatric ICU attending physicians and fellows provided mortality risk predictions and the level (...) of confidence associated with these predictions on consecutive patients at the time of multidisciplinary rounds within 24 hours of admission to the paediatric ICU. Median confidence levels were compared across different ranges of mortality risk predictions.Results: Data were collected on 642 of 713 eligible patients . Mortality predictions greater than 5% and less than 95% were made with significantly less confidence than those predictions 95%. Experience was associated with greater confidence in prognostication.Conclusions: We conclude that a physician’s subjective mortality prediction may be dependent on the level of confidence in the prognosis; that is, a physician less confident in his or her prognosis is more likely to state an intermediate survival prediction. Measuring the level of confidence associated with mortality risk predictions may therefore be important because different levels of confidence may translate into differences in a physician’s therapeutic plans and their assessment of the patient’s future. (shrink)

Time is analyzed by considering the actual setup of clock system within the four-dimensional framework. We find that both relativistic time and universal time can be embedded in such a symmetry framework. Although Poincaré and Einstein both understood the meaning of Lorentz's local time in terms of sending light signals to calibrate clocks, they differed on a basic point: Einstein believed local time to be the necessary and unique time, while Poincaré admitted flexibility in the definitions of time and regarded (...) local time as only a convention. The results of our analysis shed light on Poincaré's original idea concerning conventions of time and provide the conceptual basis for the formulation of a new four-dimensional symmetry with a universal time. We demonstrate that the one-way speeds of light measured by stable atomic clocks in rockets may not be isotropic, in contrast to the two-way speeds of light. Furthermore, atomic clocks can be used to set up a clock system which reads a universal (but not absolute) time. (shrink)

In his last major work, the posthumously published Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl presented what he described as a new path into transcendental phenomenology: the path through the "life-world" on which objective science is founded. To make objective science intelligible, Husserl held, we must inquire back into the world of everyday involvement and experience from which it emerges; this inquiry leads in turn to a thematization of the subjective structures through which the always "pre-given" life-world is itself constituted. Husserl’s demand (...) for a return to the life-world has been the subject of much discussion in the twenty-five years since the publication of the Crisis. Yet debate over the precise sense and ultimate significance of the demand continues. In this most recent contribution, E. Ströker has gathered ten essays originally presented at a 1978 conference of prominent German and American scholars. At least some of the essays should prove helpful to Husserl specialists and others interested in Husserl’s concept of the life-world. (shrink)

Despite Vancil’s (1979) proclamation over twenty years ago that topoi have been abandoned in argument theory, this essay contends that topoi should have a vital role in contemporary argumentation theory. Four key areas are identified where topoi are (or can be) essential tools for argumentation: Locating argument, building argument, development of critical thinking, and argument pedagogy. As a result, teachers and students of argument can both benefit from a (re)discovery of topoi.

Concerns about censorship have once again reached a fever pitch across the liberal West. In other historical periods, such concerns may have marked reactions to book bans and burnings. Often, they followed prosecutions and subsequent jailtime for things spoken or written. During the Red Scare, they were the hushed response to chilling state-sponsored watch-lists and employer-supported blacklists designed to ensure victory against communism. Against this history, complaints about the new censorship appear differently. With respect to the new censorship, there are (...) no books burnings, no prosecutions, no laws or committees. Indeed, there is no coercive state involvement at all. With a few notable exceptions, complaints about censorship in the 21st-century West are complaints about the behavior of private parties: social groups, employers, media conglomerates, social media platforms, and search engines. -/- To better understand the concerns surrounding nonstate interference with speech, Private Censorship offers an account of censorship, as well as an assessment of the ethical and political issues it raises across contexts. J.P. Messina asks and variously answers questions like: what should we think when employees get fired for things they say and how might patterns of such firings create a climate of fear inimical to free inquiry? When is it appropriate for social media firms to deplatform users, and what does it mean for our democracy that those in charge of such decisions are often wealthy Silicon Valley executives? Do search engines act as massive gatekeepers to information in troubling ways, and how might they be constrained, if they do? Along the way, Messina casts a critical eye on many popular proposals for responding to these complaints. Unlike these popular approaches, Private Censorship foregrounds the importance of rights to property, association, and free expression for thinking well about 21st-century censorship concerns. (shrink)

In their thought-provoking article, Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) defend the view that the status—both epistemic and ethical—of Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI) used in psychotherapy is complicated. While therapeutic CAI seems to be more than a mere tool implementing particular therapeutic techniques, it falls short of being a “digital therapist.” One of the main arguments supporting the latter claim is that even though “the interaction with CAI happens in the course of conversation… the conversation is profoundly different from a conversation with (...) a human therapist” (Sedlakova and Trachsel 2023, 8). In particular, unlike a human therapist, CAI cannot help its users gain new insight and self-understanding (Sedlakova and Trachsel 2023). We agree that currently available therapeutic CAI cannot be considered a “digital therapist,” however, we think that the issue surrounding the acquisition of new self-understanding in the interaction with therapeutic CAI is more complicated than Sedlakova and Trachsel suggest. (shrink)

Neologicists have sought to ground mathematical knowledge in abstraction. One especially obstinate problem for this account is the bad company problem. The leading neologicist strategy for resolving this problem is to attempt to sift the good abstraction principles from the bad. This response faces a dilemma: the system of ‘good’ abstraction principles either falls foul of the Scylla of inconsistency or the Charybdis of being unable to recover a modest portion of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with its intended generality. This article (...) argues that the bad company problem is due to the ‘static’ character of abstraction on the neologicist's account and develops a ‘dynamic’ account of abstraction that avoids both horns of the dilemma. 1 Introduction2ion Reconstructed3 From Bad to Worse4 Abstraction Reconceived5 Bad Company Made GoodA AppendixA.1SemanticsA.2LogicA.3ConsistencyA.4Strength. (shrink)

1. Introduction . In the chapter which he devotes to the applications of his principle of individual liberty, Mill considers the question ‘how far liberty may legitimately be invaded for the prevention of crime, or of accident’. On the latter topic, he writes:—‘… it is a proper office of public authority to guard against accidents. If either a public officer or anyone else saw a person attempting to cross a bridge which had been ascertained to be unsafe, and there were (...) no time to warn him of his danger, they might seize him and turn him back, without any real infringement of his liberty; for liberty consists in doing what one desires, and he does not desire to fall into the river.”. (shrink)

The concept of civil society has once again emerged as a viable mechanism for developing and sustaining deliberative democracy. However, an essential component of many strategies to sustain civil society appears lacking, especially when we see the growing cynicism and apathy among citizens. What is missing is a strategy for training or encouraging citizens to participate more fully in civil society. The skills of advocacy can, at least in part, help renew civic activism. Thus, the role of advocacy will be (...) explored as a potential way to resuscitate civil society. (shrink)

Objectives: To determine the effects of risk and payment on subjects’ willingness to participate, and to examine how payment influences subjects’ potential behaviours and risk evaluations.Methods: A 3 × 3 , between subjects, completely randomised factorial design was used. Students enrolled at one of five US pharmacy schools read a recruitment notice and informed consent form for a hypothetical study, and completed a questionnaire. Risk level was manipulated using recruitment notices and informed consent documents from hypothetical biomedical research projects. Payment (...) levels were determined using the payment models evaluated by Dickert and Grady as a guide. Five dependent variables were assessed in the questionnaire: willingness to participate, willingness to participate with no payment, propensity to neglect to tell about restricted activities, propensity to neglect to tell about negative effects, and risk rating.Results: Monetary payment had positive effects on respondents’ willingness to participate in research, regardless of the level of risk. However, higher monetary payments did not appear to blind respondents to the risks of a study. Payment had some influence on respondents’ potential behaviours regarding concealing information about restricted activities. However, payment did not appear to have a significant effect on respondents’ propensity to neglect to tell researchers about negative effects.Conclusions: Monetary payments appear to do what they are intended to do: make subjects more willing to participate in research. Concerns about payments blinding subjects to risks could not be substantiated in the present study. However, the findings do raise other concerns—notably the potential for payments to diminish the integrity of a study’s findings. Future research is critical to make sound decisions about the payment of research subjects. (shrink)