The papers included in this supplement were first given at a meeting, The New Ethics of Abortion, organised by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) in Senate House at the University of London on 21 February 2000. The British Pregnancy Advisory Service is primarily a provider of abortion services. Each year, the organisation provides almost 50,000 abortions, more than half of which are performed on behalf of the National Health Service (NHS), which means they are free of charge to women. (...) We are also a major source of comment to the media on issues relating to unwanted pregnancy and so we frequently face the challenge of debating those who insist that abortion is morally wrong and medically unjustifiable. The New Ethics of Abortion was organised to provide a forum in which pro-choice and anti-choice perspectives could be discussed in an atmosphere of mutual respect. We are aware that advances in technology and changed perspectives on rights—of men, of children, of the fetus, of the disabled—can have an impact on the abortion debate. We are aware that these issues are hotly contested by both those who support and those who oppose the liberal provision of abortion, and we feel that as providers of abortion care to so many women we have an important part to play. The staff at BPAS consultation centres and clinics understand abortion from the perspective of women—not women campaigners (who have their own political agenda)—but women with problem pregnancies in need of abortion care. This is a perspective that is often pushed aside when abortion is regarded as an abstract political or ethical issue. Abortion has become accepted as a part of British life. Since the 1967 Abortion Act became law in April 1968 more than five million women have benefited from safe, legal abortion in Britain. …. (shrink)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the following: Professor DW Harding for suggesting inquiry into Binet's work and for allowing use of his own ideas in ...

When we judge an action as morally right or wrong, we rely on our capacity to infer the actor's mental states. Here, we test the hypothesis that the right temporoparietal junction, an area involved in mental state reasoning, is necessary for making moral judgments. In two experiments, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt neural activity in the RTPJ transiently before moral judgment and during moral judgment. In both experiments, TMS to the RTPJ led participants to rely less on the (...) actor's mental states. A particularly striking effect occurred for attempted harms : Relative to TMS to a control site, TMS to the RTPJ caused participants to judge attempted harms as less morally forbidden and more morally permissible. Thus, interfering with activity in the RTPJ disrupts the capacity to use mental states in moral judgment, especially in the case of attempted harms. (shrink)

Geroscience and philosophy of aging have tended to focus their analyses on the biological and chronological dimensions of aging. Namely, one ages with the passage of time and by experiencing the cellular-molecular deterioration that accompanies this process. However, our concept of aging depends decisively on the social valuations held about it. In this article, we will argue that, if we study social aging in the contemporary world, a novel phenomenon can be identified: the paradox of aging in the digital era. (...) If the social understanding of aging today is linked to unproductivity and obsolescence; then there is a possibility that, given the pace of change of digital technologies, we become obsolete at an early chronological and biological age, and therefore, feel old at a younger age. First, we will present the social dimension of aging based on Rowe and Kahn's model of successful aging. We will also show that their notion of social aging hardly considers structural aspects and weakens their approach. Second, departing from social aging in its structural sense, we will develop the paradox of aging in the digital era. On the one hand, we will explain how the institutionalization of aging has occurred in modern societies and how it is anchored in the concepts of obsolescence and productivity. On the other hand, we will state the kind of obsolescence that digitalization produces and argue that it can make cohorts of biologically and chronologically young individuals obsolete, and thus they would be personally and socially perceived as old. (shrink)

Universalistic claims about the nature of justice are presumed to require larger commitments from a global perspective than partialist claims. This essay departs from standard partialist accounts by anchoring partialist claims in a different account of the nature of responsibility. In contrast to substantive responsibility, which is akin to an obligation and derived from principles, relational responsibilities grow out of relationships and their complex intertwining. While such accounts of responsibility are less clear cut, they will prove in the long run (...) to be more valuable in thinking about global ethics. I illustrate this point by considering the moral issue surrounding abandoned relationships. The approach offered here—partiality that rests upon relational responsibilities—makes the responsibilities owed by those in higher income countries towards lower income countries much richer and more complex than is usually presumed. (shrink)

One of the essential ethical issues in the employment relationship is the loss of employee voice. Many of the ways employees have previously exercised voice in the employment relationship have been rendered less effective by (1) the changing nature of work, (2) employer preferences for flexibility that often work to the disadvantage of employees, and (3) changes in public policy and institutional systems that have failed to protect workers. We will begin with a discussion of how work has changed in (...) the last 20 years in countries like Australia and the United States, and then take up the issue of employees as organizational stakeholders and the ethical duties that are owed them, with special attention given to issues of power. We will then consider whether voluntary action by employers such as social auditing is sufficient to ensure equity for employees, and conclude with a discussion of how changes in public policy might ensure greater fairness in the employment relationship by bringing employers and employees together in partnership. (shrink)

Henrich et al. provide a compelling argument about a bias in the behavioral sciences to study human behavior primarily in WEIRD populations. Here we argue that brain scientists are susceptible to similar biases, sampling primarily from WEIRD populations; and we discuss recent evidence from cultural neuroscience demonstrating the importance and viability of investigating culture across multiple levels of analysis.

This essay, and the special issue it introduces, sets out to reignite ethical interrogations of the theory and practice of Human Resource Management (HRM). To cultivate greater levels of boundary-spanning debate about the ethics of HRM, we develop a framework of four tenors for scholarly work: the ethical-declarative, the ethical-subjunctive, the ethical-ethnographic, the ethical-systemic. Each of these tenors denotes particular grounds for ethical critique and encourages scholars to consider the subjects and objects of their enquiry, the disciplinary scope of their (...) work and the limits to subsequent claims about ethics and HRM. We provisionally locate each of the papers comprising the special issue with regard to one, or more, of these tenors. (shrink)

Human resource management (HRM) education has tended to focus on specific functions and tasks within organizations, such as compensation, staffing, and evaluation. This task orientation within HRM education fails to account for the bigger questions facing human resource management and employment relationships, questions which address the roles and responsibilities of the HR function and HR practitioners. An educational focus on HRM that does not explicitly address larger ethical questions fails to equip students to address stakeholder concerns about how employees are (...) treated or the ethical dilemmas facing employers with regard to the employment relationship, and ironically makes the HRM function less strategic to the organization. In this paper, we identify some of the key ethical issues within the employment relationship, discuss how extant HRM education often fails to address these issues or help students to become aware of them, and offer a framework for integrating ethics into HRM education. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 17, Issue 2, Page 31-48, June 2012.

In this article, the author narrates the story of the second English translation of Being and time. In the first part, the author describes both the personal history and the general cultural situation which led to the necessity of a new translation of Sein und Zeit. In the second part of the essay, the author discusses some of the Heideggerian terms as Da-sein, Wiederholung, Verfallen, Geworfenheit, Befindlichkeit, focusing on the meaning and the central role of temporality in the project of (...) existential analytic. (shrink)

La cuestión que se quiere resolver en este artículo es si, pese a que la política queda fuera del sistema filosófico que plantea Descartes, hay espacio aún para ella en la reflexión filosófica derivada de dicho sistema. Para ello, se analizarán los siguientes textos cartesianos: la carta-prefacio de la edición francesa de Los principios de la filosofía, con el fin de aclarar la estructuración y la finalidad del sistema; Las pasiones del alma, para elucidar en qué consiste la moral que (...) ocupa el lugar más alto en el árbol de la filosofía, y plantear en consecuencia la dimensión social de la moral; la correspondencia con Elisabeth de Bohemia permitirá analizar la posición de Descartes hacia la política. La conclusión pasa por considerar una doble dimensión del fenómeno político, una ligada a la vida social y otra a la estructuración del poder político y a las acciones de los gobernantes. (shrink)

Elliott Sober is both an empiricist and an instrumentalist. His empiricism rests on a principle called actualism, whereas his instrumentalism violates this. This violation generates a tension in his work. We argue that Sober is committed to a conflicting methodological imperative because of this tension. Our argument illuminates the contemporary debate between realism and empiricism which is increasingly focused on the application of scientific inference to testing scientific theories. Sober’s position illustrates how the principle of actualism drives a wedge between (...) two conceptions of scientific inference and at the same time brings to the surface a deep conflict between empiricism and instrumentalism. (shrink)

This paper begins by examining Erich Fromm’s “Manifesto and Program” written for the Socialist Party in 1959 or 1960, and addresses a simple question: Why would Fromm speak of something so apparently arcane as “prophetic messianism,” in his socialist program? When he insists that we have forgotten thatsocialism is “rooted in the spiritual tradition which came to us from prophetic messianism, the gospels, humanism, and from the enlightenment philosophers,” is this simply a literary flourish, a concession to liberalism, or religious (...) sentimentality? Part I, written by Nick Braune, answers the question by examining Fromm’ssocialist organizing commitments in the context of the late 1950s. Part II, written by Joan Braune, offers further defense of the term “prophetic messianism,” distinguishes two types of messianism, and suggests that Fromm may be attempting to address a problem in the Frankfurt School. (shrink)

Research in the Sociology of Organizations is an established international, peer-reviewed series that examines cutting edge theoretical, methodological and research issues in organizational studies. Research in the Sociology of Organizations is sponsored by the ASA Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work.

It is generally acknowledged that school discipline is failing. Through a comparison of two very different disciplinary situations, I inquire into possible causes of failure and conditions of success. The argument is made that if discipline is to succeed, students must believe in and identify with the goals it is designed to support. Questions are raised as to just how embracing (pervasive throughout school life), lofty (transcending the classroom), and moralized (emphasizing social over personal) such goals should be. Without specifying (...) the ideal scope and content of an educational mission, I conclude that a moral component is both practical and proper; for it responds to a child's aspirations, builds self-esteem, and provides the social 'glue' that binds members of a society. (shrink)

Much space is devoted by Broadhead to the discussion of this strophe and its ‘various difficulties’. The discussion centres on two main issues: 1. ‘If the Chorus say ; that implies there has already been some call he might have heard & But to Darius there has been no appeal at all; nor surely could the previous invocation have been described in these excessive epithets.’ So Headlam,3 who then proceeded, in the light of Luc. Necyom.

In this paper, we shall consider the question of whether, in a context such as that of Spain that is, a context where a particular religion has been historically dominant, and within the boundaries of political liberalism, it is possible to find a reasonable argument in favour of what is termed positive laicism . In order to do so, we must first brie fly clarify what this type of laicism consists of. Below we shall explore some of the arguments which (...) could be used to defend it. We shall attempt to demonstrate that the majority of these arguments are lacking in some relevant aspect. The only defence of positive laicism that seems reasonable is one based on reasons of a politico-cultural nature which, in the context mentioned, mean that said positive laicism must be asymmetric. (shrink)

This title offers an ethical framework for end-of-life decision making in healthcare settings. Its objective is to foster and support ethically and legally sound clinical practice in end-of-life treatment and care in Ireland.

This book deals with the theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications of bounded rationality in the operation of institutions. It focuses on decisions made under uncertainty, and presents a reliable strategy of knowledge acquisition for the design and implementation of decision-support systems. Based on the distinction between the inner and outer environment of decisions, the book explores both the cognitive mechanisms at work when actors decide, and the institutional mechanisms existing among and within organizations that make decisions fairly predictable. While a (...) great deal of work has been done on how organizations act as patterns of events for (boundedly) rational decisions, less effort has been devoted to study under which circumstances organizations cease to act as such reliable mechanisms. Through an empirical strategy on open-ended response data from a survey among junior judges, the work pursues two main goals. The first one is to explore the limits of "institutional rationality" of the Spanish lower courts on-call service, an optimal scenario to observe decision-making under uncertainty. The second aim is to achieve a better understanding of the kind of uncertainty under which inexperienced decision-makers work. This entails exploring the demands imposed by problems and the knowledge needed to deal with them, making this book also a study on expertise achievement in institutional environments. This book combines standard multivariate statistical methods with machine learning techniques such as multidimensional scaling and topic models, treating text as data. Doing so, the book contributes to the collaboration between empirical social scientific approaches and the community of scientists that provide the set of tools and methods to make sense of the fastest growing resource of our time: data. (shrink)

After discussing the limitations inherent to all set-theoretic reflection principles akin to those studied by A. Lévy et. al. in the 1960s, we introduce new principles of reflection based on the general notion of Structural Reflection and argue that they are in strong agreement with the conception of reflection implicit in Cantor’s original idea of the unknowability of the Absolute, which was subsequently developed in the works of Ackermann, Lévy, Gödel, Reinhardt, and others. We then present a comprehensive survey of (...) results showing that different forms of the new principle of Structural Reflection are equivalent to well-known large cardinal axioms covering all regions of the large-cardinal hierarchy, thereby justifying the naturalness of the latter. (shrink)

This paper proposes an introduction to the Kierkegaardian relation between freedom and truth. In order to do this, mainly paying attention to his Philosophical Fragments, it begins with the Socratic problem of acquiring truth. After this, it focuses on truth as the fruit of God’s free love, whence emerges the topic of freedom. Finally, this theme leads to the Kierkegaardian account of becoming, and specifically to the relation between possibility and reality. Throughout this exposition, the central concept that articulates this (...) itinerary is the “instant”, understanding it as the point of convergence between the eternal and the temporal, stressing the paradox therein. (shrink)

The ethical theories employed in health care today assume, in the main, a modern Western philosophical framework. Yet the diversity of cultural and religious assumptions regarding human nature, health and illness, life and death, and the status of the individual suggest that a cross-cultural study of health care ethics is needed. A Cross-Cultural Dialogue on Health Care Ethics provides this study. It shows that ethical questions can be resolved by examining the ethical principles present in each culture, critically assessing each (...) value, and identifying common values found within all traditions, It encourages the development of global awareness and sensitivity to and respect for the diversity of peoples and their values and will advance understanding as well as help to foster a greater balance and a fuller truth in consideration of the human condition and what makes for health and wholeness. (shrink)

El objetivo del presente análisis es ofrecer una interpretación delMaquiavelo republicano de los Discuros en relación con la cuestión del mantenimiento interno de la república a través de treslíneas claves: la lucha contra los enemigos internos de la república,el sentido de contingencia y fragilidad en el ámbito de lo político,y la necesidad de la energía constructiva de la virtù. En lasegunda parte se exponen algunos aspectos atractivos del republicanismoneo-maquiaveliano, relacionados especialmente con ladimensión de la ciudadanía, y sus puntos de contacto (...) con la tradición liberal. El acento se pone en la necesidad de una ciudadaníaque cultive las habilidades necesarias para mantener el poder político bajo control y garantizar así la calidad de la república. (shrink)

El artículo tiene su origen en una conferencia que con el mismo título fue pronunciada en el Congreso Internacional de Filosofía Teórica y Práctica destinado a estudiar el problema del mal y ver el tratamiento realizado por varios autores empezando por Agustín de Hipona. En la presentación se quiere mostrar la característica única que tiene Agustín por la manera cómo enfrenta el problema del mal, por lo cual se le puede considerar el primer autor moderno porque el planteamiento sigue su (...) experiencia vital hecha de búsqueda de felicidad y el resultado pasa a ser la primera filosofía cristiana. Se estudia la respuesta maniquea a la que se adhirió y los motivos que le llevaron a abandonarla totalmente y superarla definitivamente tal y como queda patente en los textos claves de sus obras y en particular en las Confesiones y en el De natura boni que se presentan. (shrink)

The controversy over the so-called Ashley Treatment (AT), a series of medical procedures that inhibited both growth and sexual development in the body of a profoundly intellectually impaired girl, usually centers either on Ashley’s rights, including a right to an intact, unaltered body, or on Ashley’s parents’ rights to make decisions for her. The claim made by her parents, that the procedure would improve their ability to care for her, is often dismissed as inappropriate or, at best, irrelevant. We argue, (...) however, that caregiving is a central issue in the controversy, as Ashley’s need for caregiving is a defining characteristic of her life. In this article, we analyze the ethics of the Ashley Treatment within the context of family caregiving. Through the physical and emotional work of caregiving, families participate in the formation and maintenance of personal identity, a process that Hilde Lindemann recently called “holding.” We argue that, in an intellectually disabled person such as Ashley, who depends on her family for every aspect of her care, the family’s contribution to identity is an essential source of personhood. We believe that the treatment can be justified if it is indeed an instance of appropriate family “holding” for Ashley. (shrink)

Advance care planning (ACP) is a process that seeks to elicit patients’ goals, values, and preferences for future medical care. While most commonly employed in adult patients, pediatric ACP is becoming a standard of practice for adolescent and young adult patients with potentially life-limiting illnesses. The majority of research has focused on patients and their families; little attention has been paid to the perspectives of healthcare providers (HCPs) regarding their perspectives on the process and its potential benefits and limitations. Focus (...) groups were conducted with 15 physicians as part of a larger study of adolescent and young adult ACP in hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) patients. This study identified two categories important to the utility of ACP in pediatric HSCT patients; (1) the temporal context of ACP and decision making and (2) the limitations of pediatric ACP, with subcategories identified as (a) embodied and witnessed knowing, (b) the impact of clinical cascades—when the treatment of one organ system creates complications in another system that needs to be treated—and a creation of a “new normal” following complications of illness and its treatment in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), (c) the balancing of adolescents’ autonomy with their capacity to make informed medical decisions, and (d) the epistemological frames that differ between HCP and patients and their families. These findings support ACP in adolescent and young adult HSCT patients, with a number of implications for practice as this process becomes more common. (shrink)