When the COVID-19 surge hit New York City hospitals, the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College, and our affiliated ethics consultation services, faced waves of ethical issues sweeping forward with intensity and urgency. In this article, we describe our experience over an eight-week period (16 March through 10 May 2020), and describe three types of services: clinical ethics consultation (CEC); service practice communications/interventions (SPCI); and organizational ethics advisement (OEA). We tell this narrative through the prism of time, (...) describing the evolution of ethical issues and trends as the pandemic unfolded. We delineate three phases: anticipation and preparation, crisis management, and reflection and adjustment. The first phase focused predominantly on ways to address impending resource shortages and to plan for remote ethics consultation, and CECs focused on code status discussions with surrogates. The second phase was characterized by the dramatic convergence of a rapid increase in the number of critically ill patients, a growing scarcity of resources, and the reassignment/ redeployment of staff outside their specialty areas. The third phase was characterized by the recognition that while the worst of the crisis was waning, its medium- and long-term consequences continued to pose immense challenges. We note that there were times during the crisis that serving in the role of clinical ethics consultant created a sense of dis-ease as novel as the coronavirus itself. In retrospect we learned that our activities far exceeded the familiar terrain of clinical ethics consultation and extended into other spheres of organizational life in novel ways that were unanticipated before this pandemic. To that end, we defined and categorized a middle level of ethics consultation, which we have termed service practice communication intervention (SPCI). This is an underappreciated dimension of the work that ethics consult services are capable of in times of crisis. We believe that the pandemic has revealed the many enduring ways that ethics consultation services can more robustly contribute to the ethical life of their institutions moving forward. (shrink)

Organizational ethics programs often are created to address tensions in organizational values that have been identified through repeated clinical ethics consultation requests. Clinical ethicists possess some core competencies that are suitable for the leadership of high-quality organizational ethics programs, but they may need to develop new skills to build these programs, such as familiarity with healthcare delivery science, healthcare financing, and quality improvement methodology. To this end, we suggest that clinical ethicists build organizational ethics programs incrementally and via quality improvement (...) projects undertaken in collaboration with senior clinical leaders. Organizational ethics programs often differ from clinical ethics programs in their membership and processes, and likely will require ethicists to forge new partnerships with a wide array of organizational leaders. With attention to the ways that organizational ethics programs differ from clinical ethics programs, and investment in quality improvement methodology and formal institutional needs assessments, clinical ethics leaders can position an organizational ethics program to advocate effectively for visible and compelling alignment of leadership decision making with the values of the organization. (shrink)

Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and (...) urban dwellers across the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. When delivering benefits to others was personally costly, rates of prosocial behavior dropped across all six societies as children approached middle childhood and then rates of prosociality diverged as children tracked toward the behavior of adults in their own societies. When prosocial acts did not require personal sacrifice, prosocial responses increased steadily as children matured with little variation in behavior across societies. Our results are consistent with theories emphasizing the importance of acquired cultural norms in shaping costly forms of cooperation and creating cross-cultural diversity. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

_John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ provides a rich sampling of exchanges that could have taken place long ago between the traditions of American pragmatism and continental philosophy had the lines of communication been more open between Dewey and his European contemporaries. Since they were not, Paul Fairfield and thirteen of his colleagues seek to remedy the situation by bringing the philosophy of Dewey into conversation with several currents in continental philosophical thought, from post-Kantian idealism and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (...) to twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. This unique volume includes discussions comparing and contrasting Dewey with the German philosophers G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer on such topics as phenomenology, naturalism, organicism, contextualism, and poetry. Others investigate a series of connections between Dewey and contemporary French philosophy, including the notions of subjectivity, education, and the critique of modernity in Michel Foucault; language and politics in Jacques Derrida; and the concept of experience in Gilles Deleuze. Also discussed is the question of whether we can identify traces of _Bildung_ in Dewey’s writings on education, and pragmatism’s complex relation to twentieth-century phenomenology and hermeneutics, including the problematic question of whether Heidegger was a pragmatist in any meaningful sense. Presented in intriguing pairings, these thirteen essays offer different approaches to the material that will leave readers with much to deliberate. _ John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ demonstrates some of the many connections and opportunities for cross-traditional thinking that have long existed between Dewey and continental thought, but have been under-explored. The intersection presented here between Dewey’s pragmatism and the European traditions makes a significant contribution to continental and American philosophy and will spur new and important developments in the American philosophical debate. (shrink)

Prostate cancer has become a major health concern of male Americans. It is now the most common nondermatologic cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death among men. The incidence of detected prostate cancer rose rapidly in recent years, partly because of prostate-specific antigen testing; it is only now tapering off. Screening for prostate cancer with PSA is widespread in the United States, yet controversial: the American Urological Association recommends PSA screening and the American Cancer Society recommends offering screening; (...) however, the United States Preventive Services Task Force and the American College of Physicians recommend against routine screening; and the American Academy of Family Physicians believes that the decision to screen should be left to the patient. (shrink)

Craig, Barry M The season of Advent is not well-defined as it flows almost seamlessly from the end-time themes of the Sundays late in Ordinary Time and turns to the approaching Nativity of Christ. Lacking an event-defining start, Advent in the Roman Rite is named as the four Sundays before Christmas, thus lasting twentyone to twenty-eight days, while in the Ambrosian Rite of Milan it is six Sundays. The elements common to each Sunday's gospel reading in the Roman Rite's (...) three-year Lectionary reveal this sequence: Stay awake; John the Baptist is a voice crying in the wilderness 'Prepare a way for the Lord'; John the Baptist is a witness to Christ; Annunciation to Joseph, or to Mary, or the Visitation -in any case Mary is with child. Although this year, B, we follow the Gospel according to Mark, after reading its opening on the Second Sunday of Advent we do not read from it again until the feast of the Baptism of the Lord. Thus the Lectionary for Advent and Christmastide presents a melange of all four Gospels, with Mark the least represented. This is unavoidable since Mark provides no information from before the emergence of Jesus in his public ministry. However, homilists need to remember that this socalled year of Mark will have several interruptions from John's Gospel. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CAN DETERRENCE BE MORAL? A Review Discussion I HE AUTHORS OF A RECENT BOOK on the subject of nuclear deterrence 1 contend that the United States' nuclear deterrence policy is immoral because its credibility ultimately depends upon U.S. willingness to kill directly and intentionally innocent non-combatants, either in attacks on some cities to establish intra-war deterrence, or in final massive retaliation in response to an all-out Soviet attack. The (...) moral principle the authors use for reaching their conclusion is the inviolability of non-combatants to direct attack which was reaffirmed at Vatican II: " Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and against man himself. It merits unequiv;ocal and unhesitating condemnation." The empirical evidence the authors use to assess the morality of U.S. nuclear deterrence policy against this moral principle are statements by officials from several administrations, from Kennedy's through Reagan's, from Secretary of Defense MacNamara's statement that" U.S. strategic weapons were being placed in a configuration such that (Soviet) cities could either be spared or destroyed '', through Secretary of Defense Weil1!berger's assertion that "... our fo11ces can and will deny them their objectives at whatever level of nuclear conflict they (the Soviets) contemplate". However, the authors' conclusion that U.S. nuclear deterrence policy is immoral because it violates the just war cri1 Nualear Deterrenae: Morality and ReaUsm. By John M. Finnis, Germain Grisez and Joseph Boyle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Pp. xv + 429. Hardback, $39.95 719 720 ROBERT L. BARRY, O.P. AND MATTHEW M. MURPHY terion of discrimination differs from that reached by the American Catholic bishops in their Pastoral Letter on War and Peace: This complex question has always produced a variety of responses, official and unofficial in character. The NCCB Committee has received a series of statements of clarification of policy from U.S. government officials. Essentially these statements declare that it is not U.S. strategic policy to target the Soviet civilian population as such or to use nuclear weapons deliberately for the purpose of destroying civilian population centers. These statements respond, in principle at least, to one moral criterion for assessing deterrence policy: the immunity of non-combatants from direct attack either by conventional or nuclear weapons. (The Challenge of Peace, Para. 179) The bishops point out, however, that Administration statements : do not address or resolve another very troublesome moral problem namely, that an attack on military targets or militarily significant industrial targets could involve " indirect " (i.e., unintended) but massive civilian casualties... and that: In our consultations, administration officials readily admitted that, while they hoped any nuclear exchange could be kept limited, they were prepared to retaliate in a massive way if necessary. They also agreed that once any substantial numbers of weapons were used, the civilian casualty levels would quickly become catastrophic, and that even with attacks limited to "military" targets, the number of deaths in a substantial exchange would be almost indistinguishable from what might occur if civilian centers had been deliberately and directly struck. These possibilities pose a different moral question and are to be judged by a different moral criterion: the principle of proportionality. (The Challenge of Peace, Para. 180) Thus, the bishop's objection to U.S. nuclear ·detenent policy is that it violates the just war criterion of proportionality. Note, however, this critical distinction: while the conclusion the bishops state after applying the princip1e of discrimination to U.S. nuclear deterrent policy is an example of a morally CAN DETERRENCE BE MORAL? binding statement, the conclusion they reach after applying the principle of proportionality is an example of a prudential judgment. As such, it is "... based on specific circumstances which can change or which can he interpreted differently by people of good will " and "the moral judgments that we make in specific cases, while not binding in conscience, are to he given serious attention and consideration by Catholics as they determine whether their moral judgments are consistent with the Gospel". (emphasis added) (The ChaJ,lenge of Peace, Para. IO) We, therefore, do not believe that the authors have... (shrink)

There is a narrow thread in the vast literature on Kafka which pertains to Kafka’s knowledge of philosophy, and more precisely to Kafka’s use in his fictional writings of some of the main ideas of Franz Brentano. Kafka attended courses in philosophy at the Charles University given by Brentano’s students Anton Marty and Christian von Ehrenfels, and was for several years a member of a discussion-group organized by orthodox adherents of the Brentanian philosophy in Prague. The present essay summarizes what (...) is known about Kafka’s relations to the Brentanist movement. It draws on Brentanian ideas on the evidence of inner perception, on oblique consciousness, on active introspection, on correct and incorrect judgment, and on consciousness as a species of inner tribunal, in order to throw light on central features of Kafka’s writings, including stylistic features. Special attention is directed towards Die Verwandlung and Der Prozess, and a reading of the latter is offered according to which the trial of Joseph K. occurs entirely within the mind of K. himself. The revisions in the 1997 version of the paper relate especially to the treatment of Kafka and Brentano in Arnold Heidsieck’s book The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka’s Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion, of 1994. (shrink)

*Introduction by Joseph R. Strayer\n(ix-x) Not that Bloch was the greatest French historian of his generation, though he would certainly rank high in any list. Not even that he was the most widely read—others excelled in that art of combining exact knowledge with readability which has distinguished French scholarship for many years. Others have talked about the narrowness of purely political history, the evils of excessive specialization, and the unreality of the conventional periodization of history—without ever leaving their own (...) limited fields. Bloch not only said that history was a whole, that no period and no topic could be understood except in relation to other periods and topics, but he constantly taught [p.x] and wrote in accordance with this belief. …He worked constantly for a “wider, more human history,” for a history which described how and why people live and work together. He saw life as a whole, as a complicated interplay of ideals and realities, of conscious innovation and unconscious conservation. … Throughout the two volumes he sought, above everything else, to understand and explain the state of mind and the habits of life which could produce and support feudal organization.\n(32-33) It is very like the illusion of certain old etymologiests who thought they had said all when they set down the oldest known meaning of a word opposite its present sense, having shown… As if the main problem were not to understand how and why the transition had taken place. As if, above all, the meaning of any word were influenced more by its own past than by the contemporary state of the vocabulary which, in its turn, is determined by the social conditions of the moment. [Y: think about this when I give the meanings of sirhak]\n(64-65) …every historical research supposes that the inquiry has a direction at the very first step. In the beginning, there must be the guiding spirit. Mere passive observation, even supposing such a thing were possible, has never contributed anything productive to any science. \n(71) Every historical book worthy of the name oought to include a chapter, or if one prefers, a series of paragraphs inserted at turning points in the development, which might almost entitled: “How can I know what I am about to say?” I am persuaded that even the lay reader would experience an actual intellectual pleasure in examining these “confessions.”. (shrink)

I. The Naturalization of the Nation-State In her 1946 review of Joseph T. Delos's La Nation, Hannah Arendt describes the appearance of the early modern nation-state in terms of the new shape of civilization in the modern period: One of the main phenomena of the modern world is that civilization has renounced its old claim to universality and presents itself in the form of a particular, a national civilization. Another aspect of modern civilization is its reconstitution of the state (...) (after the period of feudalism), reconstitution however, which does not solve the fundamental problem of the state: the origin and…. (shrink)

Un mince fil dans la vaste littérature sur Kafka concerne la connaissance qu’avait Kafka de la philosophie, et plus précisément l’utilisation, dans les récits de Kafka, de quelques-unes des idées principales de Franz Brentano. Kafka a suivi des cours de philosophie à l’Université Charles, cours donnés par des étudiants de Brentano, Anton Marty et Christian von Ehrenfels. Il fut aussi, pendant plusieurs années, membre d’un groupe de discussion organisé par des partisans orthodoxes de la philosophie brentanienne à Prague. Le présent (...) essai résume ce que l’on sait des relations entretenues par Kafka avec le mouvement brentanien. Il porte sur les idées brentaniennes qui concernent l’évidence de la perception intérieure, la conscience oblique, l’introspection active, le jugement correct et incorrect et la conscience en tant qu’espèce de tribunal intérieur, dans le but d’éclairer certains aspects centraux de l’œuvre de Kafka, incluant son style. Nous porterons une attention particulière sur Die Verwandlung et Der Prozess , et nous offrirons une interprétation de ce dernier texte selon laquelle le procès de Joseph K. se passe entièrement dans l’esprit de K. lui-même. (shrink)

There is a narrow thread in the vast literature on Kafka which pertains to Kafka’s knowledge of philosophy, and more precisely to Kafka’s use in his fictional writings of some of the main ideas of Franz Brentano. Kafka attended courses in philosophy at the Charles University given by Brentano’s students Anton Marty and Christian von Ehrenfels, and was for several years a member of a discussion-group organized by orthodox adherents of the Brentanian philosophy in Prague. The present essay summarizes what (...) is known about Kafka’s relations to the Brentanist movement. It draws on Brentanian ideas on the evidence of inner perception, on oblique consciousness, on active introspection, on correct and incorrect judgment, and on consciousness as a species of inner tribunal, in order to throw light on central features of Kafka’s writings, including stylistic features. Special attention is directed towards Die Verwandlung and Der Prozess, and a reading of the latter is offered according to which the trial of Joseph K. occurs entirely within the mind of K. himself. The revisions in the 1997 version of the paper relate especially to the treatment of Kafka and Brentano in Arnold Heidsieck’s book The Intellectual Contexts of Kafka’s Fiction: Philosophy, Law, Religion of 1994. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:156 BOOK REVIEWS ject could never arrive at a viable metaphysics and shows effectively that Marechal's subject was never in isolation from the objects of sensation and thought. On the other side, he presents the PDM as an alternative to the soft theism of thinkers like Hans Kiing and as a promising approach in contemporary epistemological debates involving Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, Joseph Margolis, and many others. The (...) historians of philosophy will have to take up the critique of Matteo and Marechal on the many figures which they survey in PDM and QA. No one writer can cover so much ground without raising the ire of the specialists in particular thinkers or epochs. I shall simply say that the overview is helpful and that Matteo deserves credit for putting Marechal's readings to the test of his own reading of the works at issue. QA presents and evaluates this history with remarkable brevity, a virtue which can have its vicious side. I found the brevity to be a particular problem in the handling of Kant and of Marechal. The Critique of Pure Reason and PDM are elaborate analyses of thought, and Matteo proceeds in such summary fashion towards the big conclusions that he does less than justice to these analyses. Being so summary turns out to be a problem in showing that PDM can escape the accusations of subjectivism and relativism made by its scholastic attackers and that it has a way around those problems in present-day controversies. I myself am a partisan of the epistemology and metaphysics Marechal and Matteo advocate, but I find many of my doubts about the project unresolved by its presentation in QA. My particular concerns here center on conceptual relativism and theistic objectivity, hut anyone who can resolve those doubts definitively will have done a monumental service not just for the reviewer but for humankind. Marechal himself had intended a sixth volume more straight-forwardly along the Aristotelian-Thomist line, something which bad health prevented. We should wish Matteo the good health to develop the ideas of PDM and QA at the greater length required to achieve fully the promise claimed for them in this fine book. MICHAEL J. KERLIN La Salle University Philadelphia, Pennsylvania The Priority of Prudence. By DANIEL MARK NELSON. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Pp. ix + 164. $26.95 (cloth). In recent years, we have seen a number of attempts to recapture the natural law doctrines of Thomas Aquinas. This book is another such BOOK REVIEWS 157 attempt, and in it Nelson attempts to do two things. First, he tries to show that prudence is the most important of the virtues and is prior to nature in the process of determining the moral character of actions. Prudence is undoubtedly a highly important virtue because it is the train that carries the agent to the moral good and it must stay on track for the agent to realize fully the aims of morality. But it is not clear that it is prior to other virtues, or to nature itself, as Nelson contends, and a strong case can he made that charity is first among the virtues, and that prudence is determined by charity. Prudence is prior to the other virtues in the sense that they are all weakened by prudential failures, hut prudence wanders aimlessly, not only in the absence of the guidance of the other virtues, hut also without the guidance of nature itself. Cut loose from its secure grounds in nature, prudence and the other virtues collapse, and they need not only the secure standards provided by justice, fortitude, and charity, hut also of nature to he authentic. Second, he is trying to show that Aquinas is not so much a natural law moralist as he is a rationalist and a virtue theorist. To do this, he argues that nature serves merely an explanatory and foundational function for morality, and provides no information about moral judgments (p. 100). He subordinates nature to reason in order to resolve disputes between modern deontologists and consequentialists, hut in doing this he transforms Aquinas from a natural law moralist to a rationalist. He gives priority to reason at the... (shrink)

Protein structure is dynamic: the intrinsic flexibility of polypeptides facilitates a range of conformational fluctuations, and individual protein chains can assemble into complexes. Proteins are also dynamic in evolution: significant variations in secondary, tertiary and quaternary structure can be observed among divergent members of a protein family. Recent work has highlighted intriguing similarities between these structural and evolutionary dynamics occurring at various levels. Here we review evidence showing how evolutionary changes in protein sequence and structure are often closely related to (...) local protein flexibility and disorder, large‐scale motions and quaternary structure assembly. We suggest that these correspondences can be largely explained by neutral evolution, while deviations between structural and evolutionary dynamics can provide valuable functional insights. Finally, we address future prospects for the field and practical applications that arise from a deeper understanding of the intimate relationship between protein structure, dynamics, function and evolution. (shrink)

When Joseph Partsch wrote ‘Flavii Cresconii Corippi de vita paucissima comperta habemus’ in the preface to his long-standard edition , he was not exaggerating. Yet this has not prevented scholars from equipping the poet with a career, largely in Constantinople. Most recently, some of the details have been revived in the admirable edition of the In laudem Justini Augusti minoris by Averil Cameron. But almost every item is based solely on guesswork; the supposed career may seem to melt away (...) under a fresh and dispassionate look at what has passed for evidence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 545 Haroutunian, would have balked at the notion that their " empiricism " could be abstracted from the christological and trinitarian confession 0£ the church. In general, it would seem that a genuinely " empirical" approach would seek to engage the actual truth claims of religious com· munities on their own terms-even when those claims conflict with historicist suppositions. Second, in so far as Dean thinks there (...) is a uniquely American reli· gious experience or style of thought, privileging that style seems a dangerous move indeed. Dean is not unaware of the dangers. He specifically denies that he is engaging in any form of " American exceptionalism " (p. 25) ; it is simply that an " appropriately American historicism, centering on American culture, would have a greater chance of suggesting practices that work for and are true for America " (p. 24). But I am skeptical that such disclaimers address the real problem. Near the very end of the book, Dean suggests that a modi· fied naturalism might lead to " a notion of God that was more genuinely American than anything earlier," culminating in the recognition that " American thought about God is really the thought of a national com· munity" (p. 144). Descriptively that may well be the case; but then the Christian theologian must seek norms elsewhere. History Making History does not show us how historicist insigh~ might be incorporated into ecumenical, trinitarian theology, but that does not mean the attempt will prove unfruitful. Meanwhile, this bit of philosophical tale-telling will hold the interest of readers theological and otherwise. JOSEPH L. MANCINA Yale University New Haven, Connecticut Medical Ethics: Sources of Catholic Teaching. By KEVIN D. O'ROURKE, O.P. and PHILIP BOYLE, O.P. St. Louis: Catholic Health Associa· tion, 1989. Medical Ethics: Common Ground for Understanding. By KEVIN D. O'RouRKE, O.P. and DENNIS BRODEUR. St. Louis: Catholic Health Association, 1989. Healthcare Ethics: A Theological Analysis. By KEVIN D. O'RouRKE, O.P. and BENEDICT ASHLEY, O.P. 3rd ed. St. Louis: Catholic Health Association, 1989. Sources of Catholic Teaching is a compendium of recent "official" statements by Roman Catholic ecclesiastical bodies on issues concern· ing medical ethics. Arranged alphabetically according to topics, this col- 546 BOOK REVIEWS lection of statements from the papacy, the Roman Congregations, and the conferences of Catholic bishops could prove to he a very helpful reference tool. It contains a brief introduction which seeks to explain the role of these statements in the Catholic moral theology and Catholic medical ethics, a table of contents of the statements included, and then the statements themselves. In most instances it does not contain the entire document or statement hut only excerpts therefrom. There are some weaknesses in this work. First, these statements are not self-explanatory; they are in need of interpretation and explanation in many instances. But the authors present only the bald text and do not offer any explanatory comments. They apparently presume that these statements are pellucid to the reader, hut this is an unwarranted pre· sumption. For example, clarifying comments should have been added to the statement from the Declaration on Euthanasia because the allocution of Pius XII about giving lethal doses of analgesia is not entirely clear. A second difficulty with this work is the brief and somewhat insubstantial introduction on conscience and the role these statements should play in the formation of conscience. This sort of work invites a substantial and extended commentary on the nature of moral judgments, the relationship of conscience to the natural law, and the authority of these statements. The authors note that not all of the official statements issued by various organs of the Church are of equal authority, hut they do not try to identify the specific authoritative status of the various statements they include in their work. The reader is thus left to his or her own devices to determine, for example, the relative weight of statements of the administrative hoard of the NCCB versus statements of state episcopal conferences. A still further problem is that some of the statements are of virtually no significant authority for Catholics. For example, the statement of the administrative hoard of the NCCB on AIDS is of questionable... (shrink)

An instance of the use of a version of the analytic method known as the “ordinary-language approach” in African philosophy is characterised by a systematic examination (for the purpose of clarity) of philosophically significant concepts in an African language as used in ordinary discourse contexts among a local linguistic community. Central to this approach is the idea that the meaning of concepts depends on the ways ordinary people use them, and that this may form the basis of a philosophy. This (...) article examines Barry Hallen and Olubi Sodipo’s critical engagements with the epistemological concepts of ìmọ (knowledge) and ìgbàgbọ (belief) as an instance of this analytic methodological orientation in African philosophy. The article finds the resultant analysis of these Yoruba concepts theoretically faulty because it defeats both the rational structure of complex concept formation in Yoruba language and the logical presupposition embedded in every language. The article concludes that in order to correct this, African philosophy needs to evolve its own unique method of analysis, or otherwise reject altogether the analytic method and erect in its place its own peculiar method suitable for what it does, and consistent with the general nature of philosophy. (shrink)

Bracken synthesizes Polanyi’s notion of morphogentic field and Whitehead’s notion of societies of actual occasions. These comments emphasize the implications of the metaphors involved in these notions. The rnetaphor of plants growing in afield lies beyond the concept of a morphogenetic field, and the metaphor of a society of interacting persons lies behind the concept of a society of actual occasions. I suggest that one of the implications of this metaphor is that there is not, as Bracken argues, a problem (...) of continuity in Whitehead’s metaphysics of events. (shrink)

In the decade that followed 1972, the journal _boundary 2_ consistently published many of the most distinguished and most influential statements of an emerging literary postmodernism. Recognizing postmodernism as a dominant force in culture, particularly in the literary and narrative imagination, the journal appeared when literary critical study in the United States was in a period of theory-induced ferment. The fundamental relations between postmodernism and poststructuralism were being initially examined and the effort to formulate a critical sense of the postmodern (...) was underway. In this volume, Paul A. Bové, the current editor of _boundary 2_, has gathered many of those foundational essays and, as such, has assembled a basic text in the history of postmodernism. Essays by noted cultural and literary theorists join with Bové’s contemporary preface to represent the important and unique moment in recent intellectual history when postmodernism was no longer seen primarily as an architectural term, had not yet come to describe the wide range of culture it does now, but was finding power and place in the literary realm. These essays show that the history of postmodernism and its attendant critical theories are both more complex and more deeply bound with literary criticism than often is acknowledged today. _Early Postmodernism_ demonstrates not only the significance of these literary studies, but also the role played by literary critical postmodernism in making possible newer forms of critical and cultural studies. _Contributors_. Barry Alpert, Charles Altieri, David Antin, Harold Bloom, Paul A. Bové, Hélène Cixous, Gerald Gillespie, Ihab Hassan, Joseph N. Riddel, William, V. Spanos, Catharine R. Stimpson, Cornel West. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 44-46.

Disability activists have sometimes claimed their disability has actually increased their well-being. Some even say they would reject a cure to keep these gains. Yet, these same activists often simultaneously propose improvements to the quality and accessibility of assistive technology. However, for any argument favoring assistive over curative technology to work, there must be a coherent distinction between the two. This line is already vague and will become even less clear with the emergence of novel technologies. This paper asks and (...) tries to answer the question: what is it about the paradigmatic examples of curative and assistive technologies that make them paradigmatic and how can these defining features help us clarify the hard cases? This analysis will begin with an argument that, while the common views of this distinction adequately explain the paradigmatic cases, they fail to accurately pick out the relevant features of those technologies that make them paradigmatic and to provide adequate guidance for parsing the hard cases. Instead, it will be claimed that these categories of curative or assistive technologies are defined by the role the technologies play in establishing a person’s relational narrative identity as a member of one of two social groups: disabled people or non-disabled people. (shrink)

During the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians argued over the extramental reality of universal forms or essences. In the early modern period, the relation between subjectivity and objectivity, the individual self and knowledge of the outside world, was a rich subject of debate. Today, there is considerable argument about the relation between spontaneity and determinism within the evolutionary process, whether a principle of spontaneous self-organization as well as natural selection is at work in the aggregation of molecules into cells and (...) the development of primitive forms of life into complex organisms. In _Subjectivity, Objectivity and Intersubjectivity_, Joseph A. Bracken proposes that what is ultimately at stake here is the age-old problem of the relationship between the One and the Many, universality and particularity on different levels of existence and activity within nature. Bracken rejects traditional models of this relationship, wherein either the One or the Many is presupposed to have priority over the other. He instead suggests that a new social ontology—one that is grounded in a theory of universal intersubjectivity—protects both the concrete particularity of individual entities in their specific relations to one another and their enduring corporate reality as a stable community or environment within Nature. What emerges is a bold reimagining of the sometimes strained relationship between religion and science. Bracken's clear writing, sophisticated philosophical analysis, and exemplary scholarship will lend this new work an enthusiastic appreciation by readers with deep interests in philosophy and philosophical theology. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that, even when disability rights activists are most clearly acting as activists, they can advance the scholarly activity of disability bioethics. In particular, I will argue that even engaging in non-violent direct action, including civil disobedience, is an important way in which disability rights activists directly support the efforts of disability bioethics scholars. I will begin by drawing upon Hilde Lindemann’s work on relational narrative identity to describe how certain damaging master narratives about disability hinder (...) the uptake of arguments from disability bioethics. Then, I will argue that disability activism, especially non-violent direct action and civil disobedience, provides an effective counterstory to some of the worst of these master narratives, thereby laying the groundwork for the scholarly argument s of disability bioethicists to be given more serious consideration. Ultimately, I conclude that the field of bioethics is improved when it abandons the gross grained, generalizations about who disabled people are and how they act put forth by oppressive master narratives in favor of the more nuanced self-descriptions offered by the counterstories being offered by disabled people themselves. So it is that, by challenging these oppressive master narratives that constrain and distort the social meaning of disability, disability activism can improve mainstream bioethics. (shrink)

This book is a series of essays by distinguished scholars concerned with the improvement of primary, secondary, and tertiary studies, most especially in arts but also in mathematics and science. It is concerned with past ideas about education in Australia, most particularly with the traditions that have yielded an education that has proven most beneficial to Australia in terms of comparison with other countries; and it advocates and emphasises how this tradition can be maintained and improved in specific ways. Essays (...) focus on primary and secondary education in music, and art, mathematics, history and the classics, on the improvement of memory and vocabulary, but more particularly on university education, discussing the purpose of education, learning in general, the use of the seminar, the necessity of freedom of debate, the inadequacies and contradictions of French and Anglo-post modernism, the teaching of history, of philosophy, and its branch aesthetics, mathematics, equality in education, teaching at university and funding of the whole enterprise. The authors are all well known in their disciplines and some are experts, internationally recognised in their fields. This book features essays by: David Daintree, Karl Schmude, Simon Haines, Kevin Donnelly, Matthew Lesh, Chris Berg & Bella d'Abrera, David Furse-Roberts, Greg Melleuish, Steven Schwartz, Blaise Joseph, James Franklin, Christopher Allen, Richard Gill, Jeremy Bell, Barry Spurr, David Brooks, Natalie Kennedy, Sarah Williams, Sarah Lawrence, Ivan Francis Head. (shrink)

Patients who are imminently dying sometimes experience symptoms refractory to traditional palliative interventions, and in rare cases, continuous sedation is offered. Samuel H. LiPuma, in a recent article in this Journal, argues that continuous sedation until death is equivalent to physician-assisted suicide/euthanasia based on a higher brain neocortical definition of death. We contest his position that continuous sedation involves killing and offer four objections to the equivalency thesis. First, sedation practices are proportional in a way that physician-assisted suicide/euthanasia is not. (...) Second, continuous sedation may not entirely abolish consciousness. Third, LiPuma’s particular version of higher brain neocortical death relies on an implausibly weak construal of irreversibility—a position that is especially problematic in the case of continuous sedation. Finally, we explain why continuous sedation until death is not functionally equivalent to neocortical death and, hence, physician-assisted suicide/euthanasia. Concluding remarks review the differences between these two end-of-life practices. (shrink)

Both mainstream and disability bioethics sometimes contend that the self-assessment of disabled people about their own well-being is distorted by adaptive preferences that are only held because other, better options are unavailable. I will argue that both of the most common ways of understanding adaptive preferences—the autonomy-based account and the well-being account—would reject blanket claims that disabled people’s QOL self-assessment has been distorted, whether those claims come from mainstream bioethicists or from disability bioethicists. However, rejecting these generalizations for a more (...) nuanced view still has dramatic implications for the status quo in both health policy and clinical ethics. (shrink)

In “Bioethics and the Moral Authority of Experience,” Nelson et al. explore what they refer to as “The Paradox of Experience.” The authors characterize this paradox formally as follows:(A) Personal...

In taking properties to have powerful or dispositional essences, dispositionalism is primed to provide an account of causation. This paper lays out a challenge confronting the dispositionalist’s ability to account for how powers causally interact with one another so as to bring about collective results. The challenge, here labeled the “interaction gap,” is raised for two competing kinds of approaches to dispositional interaction: contribution combinationist and mutual manifestationist. After carefully highlighting and testing potential resources for closing the interaction gap, it (...) is concluded that the mutual manifestationist approach holds a significant advantage. In turn, the importance of the interaction gap itself is highlighted. While powers prime an ontology to yield an account of causation, how far that account can actually go depends on the metaphysical details of one’s view of powers and their causal interaction. (shrink)

Members of the Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs Standing Committee of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities present a collection of insights and recommendations developed from their collective experience, intended for those engaged in the work of healthcare ethics consultation.

Abstract.Russell Stannard distinguishes between objective time as measured in theoretical physics and subjective time, or time as experienced by human beings in normal consciousness. Because objective time, or four‐dimensional space‐time for the physicist, does not change but exists all at once, Stannard argues that this is presumably how God views time from eternity which is beyond time. We human beings are limited to experiencing the moments of time successively and thus cannot know the future as already existing in the same (...) way that God does. I argue that Stannard is basically correct in his theological assumptions about God's understanding of time but that his explanation would be more persuasive within the context of a neo‐Whiteheadian metaphysics. The key points in that metaphysics are (1) that creation is contained within the structured field of activity proper to the three divine persons of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and (2) that the spontaneous decisions of creatures are continually ordered and reordered into an ever‐expanding totality already known in its fullness by the divine persons. (shrink)

It may seem obvious that causing disability in another person is morally problematic in a way that removing or preventing a disability is not. This suggests that there is a moral asymmetry between causing disability and causing non-disability. This chapter investigates whether there are any differences between these two types of actions that might explain the existence of a general moral asymmetry. After setting aside the possibility that having a disability is almost always bad or harmful for a person (a (...) view that we have critiqued at length elsewhere), seven putative differences are considered. Ultimately, it is concluded that none of these seven factors can ground a general moral asymmetry between causing disability and causing non-disability, though each factor can provide some moral reason to avoid causing disability in certain particular cases. (shrink)

Panentheism has become a familiar term in contemporary Christian systematic theology and philosophy, for it is widely believed to be an appropriate way to overcome the alleged dualism found in the classical God-world relationship. But what is meant by the term panentheism, and how does it work so as to avoid becoming still another form of pantheism or cosmic monism? In 2004 Philip Clayton and the late Arthur Peacocke published a set of papers on the topic of panentheism that came (...) from a conference in England on that topic in 2001.1 Yet, while there were certain broad affinities in approach and content among many of the papers, none of them used precisely the same conceptual model for analysis of the concept. As.. (shrink)

“A dynamic developmental theory of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) predominantly hyperactive/impulsive and combined subtypes” is a major contribution linking comparative psychology with clinical developmental neuropsychopathology. In this commentary, I place some critical remarks concerning the theory's explanation of sleep problems, inhibition, error monitoring, and motor control.