Whoever knows a little about China—even very little—knows, in one way or another, about the Taoist Immortals, although our knowledge may be limited to the representation of them on a bit of sculptured jade, on a Han mirror or in some wood engraving. One has heard of them as an essential part of Chinese folklore. In the book of Taoist saints, the Liesien tchouan, they may be observed in all their oddness, living on pine cones or the “marrow of stones” (...) and flying off into the air toward the apotheosis of some unknown paradise. This aspect of the Immortals has been studied often and well. But there is another aspect to the Immortals no less important, a philosophical aspect which, I believe, deserves our attention. Sun Yat-sen, the “Father of the Chinese Republic,” is certainly not given the name of “Hidden Immortal” (Yat-sen, Yi-sien) out of a simple interest in folklore, and the heroes of the Chinese novel, Kia Pao-yu of the first Hong-leou mong, dedicated themselves to achieve the way of the Immortals for reasons that went deeper and were more intelligent than mere superstitious emulation of some grotesqueries of occult folklore. No, the Chinese Immortal is a veritable hero of the same stamp as Saints of the Christian tradition and like the latter he embodies a religious philosophy of the highest inspiration. (shrink)

I would like to present the details of an actual case from my own experience over which I, along with the family, have agonized. I think this case brings into focus some of the unique issues in perinatal medicine where multiple patients, some real and some potential, can enter into a single decision. I hope that through this presentation others may gain insight into the complexities of applied ethics in perinatal medicine.

If we attend to things only in terms of their bearing on our own projects then our experience of them will be filtered through their compatibility or incompatibility with those aims. This essay is about the experience of rain in the northern latitudes and the work is built around a phenomenological description that relies on accounts of direct experience which are then considered through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s conception of flesh. In thinking through the phenomenon in this way, the overlapping nature of (...) interior and exterior “reality” can be foregrounded and the notion of a dichotomy between these realms, undermined. (shrink)

Courtin, Judy As a young girl in the 1960s, I attended a Catholic boarding school. The nuns could be scary. When they walked the wintry and un-illuminated corridors of the convent, their knee-length rosary beads jangled against their ankle-length black habits.

Changes in attitude toward intellectual property are covered here.

This sparkling collection of essays both defines and reassesses the concept of Utility. Using it as a touchstone for the consideration of the place of ethics in the recent history of design, the collection offers a way into the issues which concern design decision-makers today. It offers previously unpublished research into diverse topics such as the investigation into the hitherto undiscovered designs for a utility vehicle, and it reveals a fresh perspective on the philosophy behind the concept of Utility as (...) a design theory. (shrink)

(1999). The lessons and messages of the holocaust as conveyed through Yom Hashoah (holocaust day) commemorations in selected Australian Jewish communities, 1945–1996. The European Legacy: Vol. 4, Postmodern Fascism, pp. 54-71.

Very young children occasionally commit scale errors, which involve a dramatic dissociation between planning and control: A child's visual representation of the size of a miniature object is not used in planning an action on it, but is used in the control of the action. Glover's planning–control model offers a very useful framework for analyzing this newly documented phenomenon.

The garish glow of neon was part of what put Las Vegas on the map—quite literally. The city’s most distinctive form of expression, neon signs tell an elaborate story of the history of Las Vegas, from their debut in 1929 at the onset of the Depression, when their seductive tones lured travelers through the Mojave Desert to part with scarce dollars, to today, when their flickering glow is a vanishing facet of the gaudy spectacle that is contemporary Vegas. Established in (...) 1996 to preserve Las Vegas’s underappreciated neon heritage, the Neon Boneyard houses many of the city's historic casino signs on a three-acre site at the edge of the city. The core of the collection of unrestored signage came from the pioneering Young Electric Sign Company, one of the first to produce neon signs in the area; but, in recent years, it has grown through donations from businesses and individuals who appreciate the key role played by neon in the growth of Las Vegas. Through Judy Natal’s photographs, the Neon Boneyard becomes a dynamic archaeological site that brings Vegas’s past to life in startling ways. The towering figure of Mr. O’Lucky becomes a home for the homeless, while the crumpled sign of a wedding chapel reflects the faded dreams of a lost paradise. Through such juxtapositions of success and failure, of past and present, Neon Boneyard: Las Vegas A–Z returns us to an earlier image of Vegas, suffused with the warm, commercial glow of neon, lighting the desert and inventing modern nightlife. (shrink)

Reputation is a commercially valuable asset. This book focuses upon how enhanced reputation can contribute to commercial asset management through increased share price premium and competitive performance, while reputation loss can significantly erode the ability of the business to successfully retain market share, maximize shareholder value, raise finance, manage debt, and remain independent. It provides practical models and checklists designed to plan reputation management and risk communication strategies.

In this article we explore the role of data custodians in establishing and maintaining social licence for the use of personal information in health research. Personal information from population‐level data collections can be used to make significant contributions to health and medical research, but this use is dependent on community acceptance or a social licence. We conducted semi‐structured interviews with data custodians across Australia to better understand data custodians’ views on their roles and responsibilities. This inductive, thematic analysis of the (...) interview data focuses on three factors that contribute to social licence – reciprocity, non‐exploitation and the public good. While the data custodians interviewed did not explicitly frame their role in the context of social licence, their descriptions of their roles and responsibilities clearly indicated that they did have some role to play in building and maintaining social licence. (shrink)

Biobanks for long-term research pose challenges to the legal and ethical validity of consent to participate. Different models of consent have been proposed to answer some of these challenges. This paper contributes to this discussion by considering the meaning and value of consent to participants in biobanks. Empirical data from a qualitative study is used to provide a participant view of the consent process and to demonstrate that, despite limited understanding of the research, consent provides the research participants with some (...) level of control and a form of self determination that they value. Participation is framed as a moral act of a responsible citizen providing reinforcement of self identity. Consent symbolizes the trust invested in researchers and research institutions to use the biobank for the public good. The paper argues that consent continues to play an important role in biobank participation and that a participant view should inform proposals to modify consent processes. (shrink)

In proportion to other serious illnesses, diseases of the brain and mind represent the greatest—and still increasing—public health burden that Western societies are facing. Consequently, scientists, governments, advocacy groups, and public health authorities are committed to research to tackle the causes and consequences of neurological and psychiatric diseases and to find cures for them. As neuroscience research progresses, ethicists and neuroscientists face numerous ethical challenges to the integration of frontier application of research—neurotechnology—with the delivery of high-quality healthcare. In this special (...) neuroethics issue, we have invited distinguished scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds to present their reflections and research on the ethical dimensions of this crucial integration. (shrink)

This paper reviews major structural drivers of place-based health disparities in the context of Canada, an industrialized nation with a strong public health system. Likelihood that the COVID-19 pandemic will facilitate rejuvenation of Canada’s northern and remote areas through remote working, advances in online teaching and learning, and the increased use of telemedicine are also examined. The paper concludes by identifying some common themes to address healthcare disparities for northern and remote Canadian residents.

On the morning of Friday, June 24, 2022, over half of the population of the United States was stripped of a fundamental constitutional right. And, within minutes, the reverberations of the Supreme...

This study draws on Kohlberg''s Cognitive Moral Development Theory and Hofstede''s Culture Theory to examine whether cultural differences are associated with variations in ethical reasoning. Ethical reasoning levels for auditors from Australia and China are expected to be different since auditors from China and Australia are also different in terms of the cultural dimensions of long term orientation, power distance, uncertainty avoidance and individualism. The Defining Issues Tests measuring ethical reasoning P scores were distributed to auditors from Australia and China (...) including Hong Kong and The Chinese Mainland. Results show that auditors from Australia have higher ethical reasoning scores than those from China, consistent with Hofstede''s Culture Theory predictions. (shrink)

This reference guide covers the entire history of Japan and is limited to books dealing with the doctrines and histories of the religions of Japan. It includes all works concerning religious, ethical, moral, and, to some extent, even political and educational thinkers and movements.

Ethical issues in physician-industry and academia-industry relationships have focused largely on the financial nature of these relationships. It took very little time after solutions to transparenc...

Callaway calls the process of re-appraisal of women's characteristics, social roles and culture, independent of male value systems...'re-vision', and identifies three ways it can describe women's current activities: 'Revision' in the standard sense of correcting or completing the record; then 're-vision' as looking again, a deliberate act to see through the stereotypes of our society as these are taken for granted in daily life and deeply embedded in academic tradition; and finally, 're-vision' in its extended sense as the imaginative power (...) of sighting possibilities and thus helping to bring about what is not visible, a new ordering of human relationships. (shrink)

As performativity within the academy continues to escalate, this paper considers the place for building research capacities through a scholarship in teaching and learning initiative at an Australian university. While the tensions that exist between discipline research and scholarship in teaching and learning remain, evaluation data for a central higher education research group suggests that an alternative research pathway is possible through collegial structures. The drive towards performativity is not unique to Australia and the evidence presented provides insights that may (...) be useful for a broader audience that may be considering research capacity building. (shrink)

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies.

The church looks with great anticipation to the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter as opportunities for reflection on powerful passages of Scripture recalling the major events in our Christian story. In every liturgical year, however, there are 33 or 34 Sundays known as Ordinary Time that fall between those seasons. Must they be “ordinary”?

This paper details a “metadisciplinary” applied ethics course jointly taught and pioneered by a biologist, psychologist, and ethicist on the subject of Assisted Reproduction. Contrasted with a transdisciplinary approach (whose content involves themes or issues that span traditional disciplinary lines) and a multidisciplinary approach (which involves experts from several disciplines working side by side), a metadisciplinary approach involves both of these former characteristics while incorporating a continuous, critical appreciation for the strengths and weaknesses of the contrasting methods and scopes of (...) each discipline’s methods of inquiry. This paper details the kinds of subjects that lend themselves to metadisciplinary approaches (e.g. applied ethics subjects which are real-world, complex, and studied by various disciplines), staffing guidelines for a smoothly functioning core team, how to plan and prepare the day-to-day of such a course to prevent a diffuse lesson structure, assignment and evaluation guidelines, and an appraisal of the value of such a class. The authors argue that while fundamental research may be conducted along traditional disciplinary lines, solutions to the complex problems of contemporary society require people who are equipped with problem-solving skills whose relevance spans disciplinary boundaries. (shrink)

The idea that our conscious decisions determine our actions has been challenged by a report suggesting that the brain starts to prepare for a movement before the person concerned has consciously decided to move . Libet et al. claimed that their results show that our actions are not consciously initiated. The current article describes two experiments in which we attempted to replicate Libet et al.'s comparison of participants' movement-related brain activity with the reported times of their decisions to move and (...) also the reported times of their decisions of which hand to move. We also looked at the distribution of participants' reports over time to evaluate an alternative explanation of Libet et al.'s results. Although the Readiness Potential was usually present before all of the decisions to move, consistent with the findings of Keller and Heckhausen and Libet et al. , we found that many reported decision times were before the onset of the Lateralized Readiness Potential, which measures hand-specific movement preparation. The latter finding is consistent with the conclusion that the LRP always started after the conscious decision to move. We conclude that even though activity related to movement anticipation may be present before a conscious decision to move, the cortical preparation necessary for the movement to happen immediately may not start until after the conscious decision to move. (shrink)

Benjamin Libet has argued that electrophysiological signs of cortical movement preparation are present before people report having made a conscious decision to move, and that these signs constitute evidence that voluntary movements are initiated unconsciously. This controversial conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the electrophysiological signs recorded by Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl are associated only with preparation for movement. We tested that assumption by comparing the electrophysiological signs before a decision to move with signs present before a decision (...) not to move. There was no evidence of stronger electrophysiological signs before a decision to move than before a decision not to move, so these signs clearly are not specific to movement preparation. We conclude that Libet’s results do not provide evidence that voluntary movements are initiated unconsciously. (shrink)

The question of how psychoanalysts are affected by their patients is of perennial interest. Edward Glover posed the question in an informal survey in 1940, but little came of his efforts. Now, more than half a century later, Judy Kantrowitz rigorously explores this issue on the basis of a unique research project that obtained data from 399 fully trained analysts. These survey responses included 194 reported clinical examples and 26 extended case commentaries on analyst change. Kantrowitz begins _The Patient's (...) Impact on the Analyst_ by documenting how the process of analysis fosters an interactional process out of which patient and analyst alike experience therapeutic effects. Then, drawing on the clinical examples provided by her survey respondents, she offers a detailed exploration of the ways in which clinically triggered self-reflection represents a continuation of the analyst's own personal understanding and growth. Finally, she incorporates these research findings into theoretical reflections on how analysts obtain and integrate self-knowledge in the course of their ongoing clinical work. This book is a pioneering effort to understand the therapeutic process from the perspective of its impact on the analyst. It provides an enlarged framework of comprehension for recent discussions of self-analysis, countertransference, interaction, and mutuality in the analytic process. Combining a wealth of experiential insight with thoughtful commentary and synthesis, it will sharpen analysts' awareness of how they work and how they are affected by their work. (shrink)