Increased emphasis has been placed on teaching ethics in business schools. A recent meta-analysis of business ethics instruction indicated that instructional programs have a minimal impact on improving ethical behaviors (Waples et al. 2008). One of the newest trends in MBA education is gamification which allows instructors to employ video game concepts to engage students in serious business problems. Educators are attempting to harness a similar sort of power exhibited by games like FarmVille or Call of Duty and translate this (...) power into improved educational outcomes. This trend leads to the question; can gamification improve ethical learning outcomes? Using a single cohort of MBA students, ethics instruction in the MBA program was gamified and then operationalized in the students’ first required class and last required class. Although the sample was limited to a single cohort of students, results were promising, indicating improvement in ethical decision making and warranting further study. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

In this companion volume to their 1981 work, A Philosophical Basis of Medical Practice, Pellegrino and Thomasma examine the principle of beneficence and its role in the practice of medicine. Their analysis, which is grounded in a thorough-going philosophy of medicine, addresses a wide array of practical and ethical concerns that are a part of health care decision-making today. Among these issues are the withdrawing and withholding of nutrition and hydration, competency assessment, the requirements for valid surrogate decision-making, quality-of-life (...) determinations, the allocation of scarce health care resources, medical gatekeeping, and for-profit medicine. The authors argue for the restoration of beneficence to its place as the fundamental principle of medical ethics. They maintain that to be guided by beneficence a physician must perform a right and good healing action which is consonant with the individual patient 's values. In order to act in the patient 's best interests, or the patient 's good, the physician and patient must discern what that good is. This knowledge is gained only through a process of dialogue between patient and/or family and physician which respects and honors the patient 's autonomous self-understanding and choice in the matter of treatment options. This emphasis on a dialogical discernment of the patient 's good rejects the assumption long held in medicine that what is considered to be the medical good is necessarily the good for this patient. In viewing autonomy as a necessary condition of beneficence, the authors move beyond a trend in the medical ethics literature which identifies beneficence with paternalism. In their analysis of beneficence, the authors reject the current emphasis on rights- and duty-based ethical systems in favor of a virtue-based theory which is grounded in the physician- patient relationship. This book's provocative contributions to medical ethics will be of great interest not only to physicians and other health professionals, but also to ethicists, students, patients, families, and all others concerned with the relationship of professional to patient and patient to professional in health care today. (shrink)

Governing Animals explores the role of the liberal state in protecting animal welfare. Examining liberal concepts such as the social contract, property rights, and representation, Kimberly K. Smith argues that liberalism properly understood can recognize the moral status and social meaning of animals and provides guidance in fashioning animal policy.

In recent years, and in close connection with a number of well-known financial malpractice cases, public debate on business ethics has intensified worldwide, and particularly in ethics-unfriendly environments, such as Spain, with many recent fraud and corruption scandals. In the context of growing consensus on the need of balancing social prosperity and business profits, concern is increasing for introducing business ethics in higher education curricula. The purpose is to improve ethical behaviour of future business people, and of accounting professionals in (...) particular. In this study, from a sample of 551 business students at a Spanish university, the importance of accounting ethics is investigated. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we attempt to examine students’ overall perceptions of business ethics in unfriendly environments and, specifically, their views on the importance and goals of accounting ethics education. Second, we intend to investigate whether potential differences in such perceptions depend on previous business ethics courses taken, gender, and age of students. Our results show that those students who have previously taken an ethics course are especially prone to considering that accounting education should include ethical considerations, and show greater interest in further introducing this subject in their curricula. These facts should encourage universities offering business degrees in ethics-unfriendly environments to extend the implementation of ethics courses in their curricula. Besides, significant differences in students’ perceptions on the importance of accounting ethics are found depending on their gender and age. In line with previous research findings, female and older students show more ethical inclinations than, respectively, male and younger students. Thus, ethics-unfriendly environments can be treated as contexts where general trends on students’ ethical attitudes are also clearly visible. This fact, together with the evidenced impact of ethics courses on students’ ethical inclinations, places ethics-unfriendly environments as crucial research settings for further inquiring into the nuances that help explain students’ attitudes towards accounting ethics and the role of ethics courses in business degree curricula. (shrink)

We argue that, under certain plausible assumptions, de Sitter space settles into a quiescent vacuum in which there are no dynamical quantum fluctuations. Such fluctuations require either an evolving microstate, or time-dependent histories of out-of-equilibrium recording devices, which we argue are absent in stationary states. For a massive scalar field in a fixed de Sitter background, the cosmic no-hair theorem implies that the state of the patch approaches the vacuum, where there are no fluctuations. We argue that an analogous conclusion (...) holds whenever a patch of de Sitter is embedded in a larger theory with an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, including semiclassical quantum gravity with false vacua or complementarity in theories with at least one Minkowski vacuum. This reasoning provides an escape from the Boltzmann brain problem in such theories. It also implies that vacuum states do not uptunnel to higher-energy vacua and that perturbations do not decohere while slow-roll inflation occurs, suggesting that eternal inflation is much less common than often supposed. On the other hand, if a de Sitter patch is a closed system with a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, there will be Poincaré recurrences and dynamical Boltzmann fluctuations into lower-entropy states. Our analysis does not alter the conventional understanding of the origin of density fluctuations from primordial inflation, since reheating naturally generates a high-entropy environment and leads to decoherence, nor does it affect the existence of non-dynamical vacuum fluctuations such as those that give rise to the Casimir effect. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: For the Patient's Good: The Restoration of Beneficence in Health Care. By Edmund D. Pellegrino and David C. Thomasma.

Virtue is the most perdurable concept in the history of ethics, which is understandable given the ineradicability of the moral agent in the events of the moral life. Historically, virtue enjoyed normative force as long as the philosophical anthropology and the metaphysics of the good that grounded virtue were viable. That grounding has eroded in both general and medical ethics. If virtue is to be restored to a normative status, its philosophical underpinnings must be reconstructed. Such reconstruction seems unlikely in (...) general ethics, where the possibility of agreement on the good for humans is remote. However, it is a realistic possibility in the professional ethics of the health professions where agreement on the telos of the healing relationship is more likely to arise. Nevertheless, virtue-based ethics must be related conceptually and normatively to other ethical theories in a comprehensive moral philosophy of the health professions. (shrink)

What the philosophy of medicine is -- Philosophy of medicine: should it be teleologically or socially construed? -- The internal morality of clinical medicine: a paradigm for the ethics of the helping and healing professions -- Humanistic basis of professional ethics -- The commodification of medical and health care: the moral consequences of a paradigm shift from a professional to a market ethic -- Medicine today: its identity, its role, and the role of physicians -- From medical ethics to a (...) moral philosophy of the professions -- Moral choice, the good of the patient, and the patient's good -- The four principles and the doctor-patient relationship: the need for a better linkage -- Patient and physician autonomy: conflicting rights and obligations in the physician-patient relationship -- Character, virtue, and self-interest in the ethics of the professions -- Toward a virtue-based normative ethics for the health professions -- The physician's conscience, conscience clauses, and religious belief: a Catholic perspective -- The most humane of the sciences, the most scientific of the humanities -- The humanities in medical education: entering the post-evangelical era -- Agape and ethics: some reflections on medical morals from a catholic christian perspective -- Bioethics at century's turn: can normative ethics be retrieved? -- Hippocratic tradition -- Toward an expanded medical ethics: the Hippocratic ethic revisited -- Medical ethics: entering the post-Hippocratic era. (shrink)

Ethical conflicts (ECs), dilemmas auditors face when personal values or professional obligations clash with their actions, pose significant challenges to the auditing profession, potentially influencing turnover intention (TI). This study addresses a knowledge gap in the related research by focusing on two critical EC triggers: workload (WL) and perceived auditor ethical failure (PAEF: ethical sensitivity), which refers to auditors’ perceptions of ethical violations within their profession. Grounded in role theory and ethical climate theory, our study investigates the impact of WL (...) and PAEF on ECs and explores how these conflicts mediate the relationship between PAEF/WL and TI. Additionally, we examine the moderating role of organisational ethical climate (EtC) in these relationships. Using a survey of auditors and employing partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), our results reveal that both WL and PAEF increase ECs, thus escalating TI. The findings suggest that a firm’s perceived EtC can negatively moderate the relationship between PAEF and ECs. The study underlines the importance of fostering a strong EtC to manage ECs effectively and provides valuable implications for professionals, regulators, and academics seeking to improve ethical practices within auditing firms and to reduce auditor turnover. (shrink)

Although the recent push toward sustainability is certainly generally a positive development in business and society, we can see many problems in the execution of the theory of sustainability. Where the triple bottom line calls on companies to weigh effects on stakeholders and the environment alongside profit, in practice in many cases, sustainability has been perverted to represent sustainable profits. In these cases, environmental impact and effects on people are only important insofar as they positively contribute to a firm‘s future (...) profits. It is not only practitioners who have often espoused this misappropriated view of sustainability but also academics have lent credibility to this view. In this work, we start by criticizing the often espoused current view of sustainability and remind academics of their responsibility to adapt a more critical view of this narrow focus. We provide examples that show how the current system of capitalism has resulted in outcomes for people and the environment that are patently unacceptable. Reasons are given as to why there is much hesitation to change the status quo. We then call on academics to reexamine what the role of businesses should be within society, what obligations business and corporations should have in society, and how we can encourage meaningful change that results in a better world for future generations. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty decía que nuestra relación con el mundo se sitúa en el orden del «misterio insoluble». Es la invisibilidad de los dioses lo que garantiza la visibilidad del mundo. Este verso invisible –«le Dieu caché», «Dieu insondable», «Être muet», «arrière-silence», «membrure cachée», en términos merleau-pontianos– es la textura misma del recto visible. En el cine extremo o visionario este lenguaje aparentemente antitético no está menos presente para expresar eso que excede a toda visibilidad. Voyance (Merleau-Ponty) que emerge de los légamos (...) de lo invisible pero que no es lo contrario de la vista: «vision [est] ek-stase...», una visión en la que el mudo Ser revela su propio sentido. Así pues, lo invisible no es lo opuesto absoluto de lo visible sino más bien, como dice Merleau-Ponty, su «contrapartida secreta» sin la cual no podría existir la visibilidad. Asimismo, según Derrida, la imagen cinematográfica tiene una estructura fantasmática, está suspendida entre la presencia y la ausencia, pues la invisibilidad determina la lógica de las imágenes. El cine es un ojo, pero sólo ve bien cuando también se relaciona con ese ojo interior que es el de la «visión» de los visionarios. Igualmente, para Jean-Luc Godard, uno de los cineastas más relevantes del cine contemporáneo, la imagen real es la que no vemos. Lo que se ve en el filme tiene menos importancia que lo invisible. Violencia del mirar, desvelamiento de otra luz, que restituye la imagen de lo sagrado. (shrink)

CATHOLIC PERSPECTIVES AND CONTEMPORARY MEDICAL MORALS A Catholic perspective on medical morals antedates the current world wide interest in medical and biomedical ethics by many centuries[5]. Discussions about the moral status of the fetus, abortion, contraception, and sterilization can be found in the writings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. Teachings on various aspects of medical morals were scattered throughout the penitential books of the early medieval church and later in more formal treatises when moral theology became recog (...) nized as a distinct discipline. Still later, medical morality was incorpor ated into the many pastoral works on medicine. Finally, in the contemporary period, works that strictly focus on medical ethics are produced by Catholic moral theologians who have special interests in matters medical. Moreover, this long tradition of teaching has been put into practice in the medical moral directives governing the operation of hospitals under Catholic sponsorship. Catholic hospitals were monitored by Ethics Committees long before such committees were recommended by the New Jersey Court in the Karen Ann Quinlan case or by the President's Commission in 1983 ([8, 9]). Underlying the Catholic moral tradition was the use of the casuistic method, which since the 17th and 18th centuries was employed by Catholic moralists to study and resolve concrete clinical ethical dilem mas. The history of casuistry is of renewed interest today when the case method has become so widely used in the current revival of interest in medical ethics[ll]. (shrink)

When a provocateur intentionally provokes a deadly affray, the law of self-defense holds that the provocateur may not use deadly force to defend himself. Why is this so? Provocateurs are often seen as just one example of the problem of actio libera in causa, the causing of the conditions of one’s defense. This article rejects theories that maintain a one-size-fits-all approach to actio libera in causa, and argues that provocateurs need specific rules about why they forfeit their defensive rights. This (...) article further claims that provocateurs need to be distinguished from their cousins, initial aggressors, as initial aggressors engage in conduct that grounds the permissibility of the defender’s behavior whereas the provocateur’s behavior does not justify the respondent’s use of force against him. In addition, this article rejects that the basis of this forfeiture can be found in the doctrines surrounding when and why mitigation for provocation is appropriate for the respondent. Provocateurs forfeit their defensive rights for the very simple reason that they start the fight. This forfeiture occurs when they behave culpably, meaning that they subjectively appreciate that they are running the risk of causing force to be used against them and they engage in this behavior without justification or excuse. The question of when the provocateur’s behavior is justified is incredibly complex. It requires analysis of when it is that one is justified in increasing the risk of another’s wrongdoing. Any analysis of this justification must take seriously the liberty rights of the potential provocateur to engage in otherwise permissible behavior. Moreover, the determination of whether the provocateur is justified will turn on whether the later acts that he puts into motion are themselves justified. Thus, when Charles Bronson in the movie Death Wish presents himself as a victim so that muggers will attack him, the justifiability of his conduct in appearing as a vulnerable victim will turn on whether he is entitled to engage in this conduct, intending to later defend himself. This article argues that in Death Wish-type cases, the reason that the provocateur is not justified is because he becomes a vigilante, thereby usurping the role of the state and undermining rule of law values. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have come to understand emotions as dynamic and socially constructed—the product of interdependent cultural, relational, situational, and biological influences. While researchers have called for a multilevel theory of emotion construction, any progress toward such a theory must overcome the fragmentation of relevant research across various disciplines and theoretical frameworks. We present affect control theory as a launching point for cross-disciplinary collaboration because of its empirically grounded conceptualization of social mechanisms operating at the interaction, relationship, and cultural (...) levels, and its specification of processes linking social and individual aspects of emotion. After introducing the theory, we illustrate its correspondence with major theories of emotion construction framed at each of four analytical levels: cultural, interactional, individual, and neural. (shrink)

The U.S. Supreme Court declared procreation to be a fundamental right in the early twentieth century in a case involving Oklahoma's Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act, an act that permitted unconsented sterilization of individuals convicted of certain crimes. The right that the Court articulated in that case is a negative right: it requires that the government not place unjustified roadblocks in the way of people seeking to procreate, but it does not require the government to take positive steps to help people (...) procreate if they wish to. I argue that a positive legal right is morally necessary in the United States, given the profound significance of procreation, the current barriers to access to care, and the related issues of individual and societal justice. I assume at the outset that the right to procreate should be expansive enough to include a right to noncoital reproduction. The absence of a positive right to procreate reflects not just constitutional tradition but also a governmental and societal commitment to a longstanding set of reproductive hierarchies by which those who fall outside of the traditional framing of family too frequently find their procreative dreams hindered. Reconceiving procreative rights to include a positive right would create greater opportunities to argue and lobby for increased access to technologies that are out of reach for many. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:President’s Council on BioethicsEdmund D. Pellegrino (bio) and F. Daniel Davis (bio)Approximately two weeks before what was to have been its final meeting, the White House dissolved the President’s Council on Bioethics by terminating the appointments of its 18 members. The letters of dismissal, dated 10 June 2009, informed the members that their service on the Council would end with the close of business the next day.The Council’s (...) term was set to expire on 30 September 2009. After President Obama’s election in November and during the transition, we were advised to proceed on the assumption that the Council would be permitted to cease on that date. Reasons for the abrupt move to disband the Council are unknown. We have accepted the fact that we Council members served at the pleasure of the President and that he simply exercised his rightful prerogative. No explanation is therefore required.Some observers have speculated that the action was retaliatory. They related to the fact that several members of the Council disagreed with the President’s stem cell policy in a signed statement published in the Hastings Center’s Bioethics Forum. Others have speculated that the move was pre-emptive. At its final meeting, scheduled for 25–26 June, the Council was set to sign-off on two of its final publications. One was a comprehensive report on the ethics of organ transplantation, and the other a white paper entitled Health Care and the Common Good. The aim was immediately to release the latter as a contribution to the intensifying debate about health care reform. Health Care and the Common Good could well have aided rather than impeded the President’s drive to better control health care costs and achieve universal coverage. The Council report attempted to ground both goals in the ethical framework of, as the title indicates, the common good of all Americans.In his letter terminating the members’ appointments, Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel Don Gips said that the President “recognizes the values of having a commission of experts in bioethical issues to provide objective and non-ideological bioethics advice to his administration.” Gips went on to say that the President is “currently rethinking the purposes and goals of such a bioethics commission, and is carefully considering a revitalized mission and mandate.” And, [End Page 309] responding to media enquiries, White House press officer Reid Cherlin explained that the President’s Council was terminated because it was a “philosophically leaning advisory group” and, according to a New York Times account by Nicholas Wade, “because it favored discussion over developing a shared consensus.” As for the ultimate outcome of the President’s “rethinking,” Cherlin indicated that President Obama will appoint a new commission with the mandate of offering “practical policy options” in bioethics.In the light of our experiences with the Council, we leave it with hopes that certain questions of national importance will be addressed. In light of the nature of federal advisory commissions, what is or are the proper roles of a national bioethics commission? If the aim is to provide advice and counsel to the President or, perhaps to the U. S. Congress, is that advice best rendered as a group consensus or as an in-depth exploration of the inevitably conflicting ethical perspectives on a given issue? How should such a commission be constituted—with what sorts of individuals? And what is the nature of the expertise that they individually and collectively bring to the commission’s functions? If the commission is to promote public debate and discussion, how exactly should it go about that task? And how is the efficacy of a commission to be assessed? Such questions inevitably lead us deep into contested territory, as the experience of this Council has shown: into the intersections of politics, religion, and science and into the relations between practice and theory—between policy and what some seem to deride as “philosophy.” Indeed, policy without an underlying philosophy is an edifice without a foundation; philosophy without policy is a foundation without an edifice.At the last meeting of the Council in March 2009, we launched a discussion of these questions with the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Origins and Evolution of Bioethics: Some Personal ReflectionsEdmund D. Pellegrino (bio)AbstractBioethics was officially baptized in 1972, but its birth took place a decade or so before that date. Since its birth, what is known today as bioethics has undergone a complex conceptual metamorphosis. This essay loosely divides that metamorphosis into three stages: an educational, an ethical, and a global stage. In the educational era, bioethics focused on (...) a perceived “dehumanization” of medicine by the rising power of science and technology. Remedies were sought by introducing humanities, ethics, and human “values” into the medical curriculum. Ethics was one among the humanistic disciplines, but not the dominant one. In the second era, ethics assumed a dominant role as ever more complex dilemmas emerged from the rapid pace of biological research. As such dilemmas were applied to medical practice, the need for a more rigorous and more formal analysis of their moral status was clear. Philosophically-trained ethicists had an obvious role. They began to teach, write, and profoundly influence medical education and practice. In the third—and present—period, the breadth of problems has become so broad that ethicists must, themselves, draw on disciplines well beyond their expertise—e.g., law, religion, anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and the like. The era of bioethics as a global enterprise is upon us. The original hope for humanizing medicine has not been overtly successful; however, much has been accomplished of value to patients, the profession, and society. Medical morality has been transformed into a formal, systematic study of a whole range of issues of the greatest significance to humanity. Now the major challenge is one of identity, or inter-relationships and connections between the theoretical and the practical. Bioethics has outgrown its beginnings.I have been invited to give a “personal recollection” of the early development of bioethics. Such invitations are notoriously hard to resist, but also problematic when they are the recollections of a participant [End Page 73] in the events to be described. We need only be reminded of the vagaries common to the plethora of memoirs on the book stands today. Few have escaped the perils of selective memory, self-promotion, or the settling of old scores. Yet their perils notwithstanding, memoirs may serve some useful purpose. They are the raw material—verbal kitchen middens so to speak—out of which historians can later sift fact from fancy. They enable “tribal elders” to give witness to the past from which the present can fashion some sense of continuity.I will organize my reflections around three very arbitrary time periods that represent my own way of thinking about the evolution of bioethics: (1) an era of “proto-bioethics” (1960–1972), (2) an era of philosophical bioethics (1972–1985), and (3) an era of global bioethics (1985-present). Each era, of course, overlaps with the others, and the dominant strand of each runs through the others as well.In the proto-bioethics period, the language of human values predominated; in the era of bioethics philosophically construed, it was the language of philosophical ethics; and in the era of bioethics globally construed, the social and behavioral sciences have gained greater prominence. In each period, interest in the traditional humanities other than philosophy waxed and waned. In the earlier years, religion and theology predominated. Beginning in the 1970s, philosophy took a dominant role. In the last two decades, other disciplines, like law, literature, and the social sciences, have exerted more and more influence (McNeur 1963; Pellegrino 1997; Barker 1987).I make no pretense here of writing any part of the formal “history” of bioethics. Works of this nature are beginning to appear (Rothman 1991; Jonsen 1998 ; Dell’Oro and Viafora 1996). Thomas McElhinney and I are preparing our own account of the work and influence of the Institute on Human Values in Medicine, one of the influential programs of the Society for Health and Human Values (Pellegrino and McElhinney, n.d.). Space limitations as well as prudence preclude any attempt to do justice to all the events, institutions, and people who have made the field of bioethics what it is today. I apologize for these omissions, for any unintentional lapses of... (shrink)

This fellowship project addressed the need to increase diversity in public health law. Non-traditional delivery methods of education, such as synchronous online classes and offering courses during an intersession between regular semesters and in the evenings, expanded the opportunities for diverse students to learn about the field and have meaningful internship experiences in public health law. Synchronous distance education is the wave of the future for law teaching and has particular significance in the teaching of public health law.

Although it is not yet officially recognized as a clinical entity which is diagnosable, Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) has been included in section III for further study in the DSM-5 by the American Psychiatric Association (APA, 2013). This is important because there is increasing evidence that people of all ages, in particular teens and young adults, are facing very real and sometimes very severe consequences in daily life resulting from an addictive use of online games. This article summarizes general aspects (...) of IGD including diagnostic criteria and arguments for the classification as an addictive disorder including evidence from neurobiological studies. Based on previous theoretical considerations and empirical findings, this paper examines the use of one recently proposed model, the Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution (I-PACE) model, for inspiring future research and for developing new treatment protocols for IGD. The I-PACE model is a theoretical framework that explains symptoms of Internet addiction by looking at interactions between predisposing factors, moderators, and mediators in combination with reduced executive functioning and diminished decision making. Finally, the paper discusses how current treatment protocols focusing on Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Internet addiction (CBT-IA) fit with the processes hypothesized in the I-PACE model. (shrink)

This response to Kevin WildesÕs article in the previous issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal addresses several major points of disagreement between Pellegrino and Wildes regarding the nature and scope of a philosophy of medicine, in particular how it is derived and by what method of philosophical enquiry it is best pursued.

The multi-faceted ecological crisis—combining problems of ecology, society, and religion—is tied to the ideologies implicit in Western thinking. In this essay, I outline an ecofeminist theology which addresses how the current ecological crisis we face—including but not limited to, climate change, mass species extinction, ocean acidification, the rise in wildfires and superstorms, glacial melt, pollution—are tied to problematic and incorrect ideologies. To do this, I utilize Val Plumwood’s robust ecofeminist philosophy to revealing harmful dualisms implicit in all forms of oppression. (...) I critique transcendental monotheism for extracting life, God, and agency from the natural world. If God exists over and above the Earth, and this God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, this justifies the problematic lagged response to our urgent ecological crisis. In short, my ecofeminist theology affirms intersectionality. It considers racial injustice and systemic racism are intertwined with the ecological crises. We cannot address our ecological crisis without also addressing racial injustice. It critiques a transcendental monotheistic God as this reinforces irresponsible and apathetic responses to our multi-faceted ecological crisis. And it affirms Plumwood’s “philosophical animism” as a way to retrieve nature in the active voice. By retrieving nature in the active voice, we retrieve a sense of groundedness in place through relationships with non-humans. Her “philosophical animism” affirms agency in the natural world without culturally appropriating Indigenous cultures. It is a way for Westerners to enter into dialogical relationship with the natural world. It is both political—affirming the rights of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color—and it is personal—engaging in a practice of the wild. (shrink)

In The Myth of Ownership, Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel argue that achieving fairness in taxation is principally a matter of distributive justice. Distributive justice can be understood as being concerned with what is owed to people as a matter of justice. For Nagel and Murphy, fairness in tax schemes is subsumed to the question of distributive justice: fairly allocated tax liabilities are just those that are compatible with the preferred theory of distributive justice. Subsuming assessments of tax fairness to (...) distributive justice, however, overlooks the following possibility: that the question of how we ought to divvy up tax liabilities, and the burdens associated with running a society more generally, requires different, non-distributive considerations of justice. These are considerations of justice that aren’t essentially about distributive justice at all. I argue here that the division of burdens in a society is specifically a matter of contributive justice. Contributive justice is concerned with what people owe as a matter of justice, rather than what is owed to them. It makes the division of burdens itself evaluative salient in assessments of fairness. Even a comprehensive specification of distributive justice leaves indeterminate how the burdens of running a society should be fairly divided up. Each of the chapters in this dissertation develops one part of an account of contributive justice. I first make conceptual space for an account of contributive justice. By taking Murphy and Nagel’s lead, and working within the post-distribution, a distinctive need for principles of justice in contribution can be shown. Murphy and Nagel decline to introduce non-distributive principles for guiding the provision of post-distributive public goods. Instead, they favor efficiency in determining the provision of post-distributive of public goods. I show that contributive justice is genuinely distinct from both efficiency and distributive justice. I also identify one respect in which principles of contributive justice should bear: that of determining the financing and delivery and civic cultural public goods. I then argue that a principle of contribution in accordance with ability (a principle of “ability-to-pay”, or “ability-to-contribute”, for short) stands out as a candidate principle of contributive justice. The version of ability-to-pay that I defend is, in particular, a deontic principle of ability-to-pay. I show that a deontic principle of ability-to-pay is more closely allied with a view of society as a cooperative enterprise than utilitarian versions of ability-to-pay. An account of ability to contribute is developed by grafting a notion of opportunity cost onto Amartya Sen’s capability theory. Lastly, I incorporate contributive justice in an account of contributive legitimacy. Contributive legitimacy gives us a set of conditions under which the state’s use of coercive force to extract tax contributions is legitimate, and hence justified. Drawing on empirical evidence from the development and fiscal sociology literature, I show that contributive legitimacy in a state’s tax extraction practices is essential to rule of law, and the avoidance of kleptocratic authoritarianism. Contributive legitimacy supplements our understanding of conventional notions of political legitimacy and helps us identify possible failures of political legitimacy. These are failures that might be overlooked were we to focus solely on distribution. (shrink)

Richard Lamm is an eloquent and insistent advocate for healthcare reform. In his paper, he argues that if reform is to be effective, a radical metamorphosis in the values underlying our present system must take place. “New realities” have made the “old values” unsustainable. Unless they are replaced by “new values,” we face a future of disastrous overspending, gross inequities in accessibility, poorer health for many, and more expensive dying.

As resident physicians practicing Internal Medicine in hospitals within the USA, we are confronted on a daily basis with patients who wish to leave the hospital floor to smoke a cigarette. While many physicians argue that hospitals should do everything in their power to prevent patients from smoking, we argue that a more comprehensive and nuanced approach is needed. In part 1 of this perspective piece, we outline the various forms of smoking bans in hospital settings, applauding the development of (...) indoor smoking bans while questioning the move towards stricter, campus-wide smoking bans. In part 2, we turn to traditional biomedical ethics to guide our approach to the hospitalised patient who smokes. This approach, which is informed by our backgrounds in harm reduction and medical anthropology, takes into account the lived realities of patients and acknowledges the complicated sociohistorical contexts of tobacco use. (shrink)

Hegel and Feminist Philosophy traces the legacy of Hegel in the work of thinkers such as de Beauvoir, Irigaray and Butler, and also in contemporary debates in ...