Joseph Heath states that our paper “misinterpret[s]” and so misrepresents his account. The present Commentary corrects the record. Our paper (Cohen and Peterson 2019) outlined Heath’s account on his own terms; it explained that Heath distances himself from consequentialism. But then we argued that Heath is mistaken and so offered a repaired version of the market failures approach. Our central concern, in the original paper and in this short Commentary, is showing that the economic argument for markets is at the (...) same time ethical, and then being more precise about the ethical consideration that does the work. (shrink)

Dissent and Philosophy in the Middle Ages offers scholars of Dante's Divine Comedy an integral understanding of the political, philosophical, and religious context of the medieval masterwork. First penned in French by Ernest L. Fortin, one of America's foremost thinkers in the fields of philosophy and theology, Dissidence et philosophie au moyen-%ge brings to light the complexity of Dante's thought and art, and its relation to the central themes of Western civilization. Available in English for the first time through this (...) superb translation by Marc A. LePain, Dissent and Philosophy will make a supremely important contribution to the discussion of Dante as poet, theologian, and philosopher. (shrink)

Conflicts of interest are rampant in the American medical community. Today it is not uncommon for doctors to refer patients to clinics or labs in which they have a financial interest (40% of physicians in Florida invest in medical centers); for hospitals to offer incentives to physicians who refer patients (a practice that can lead to unnecessary hospitalization); or for drug companies to provide lucrative give-aways to entice doctors to use their "brand name" drugs (which are much more expensive than (...) generic drugs). In Medicine, Money and Morals, Marc A. Rodwin draws on his own experience as a health lawyer--and his research in health ethics, law, and policy--to reveal how financial conflicts of interest can and do negatively affect the quality of patient care. He shows that the problem has become worse over the last century and provides many actual examples of how doctors' decisions are influenced by financial considerations. We learn how two California physicians, for example, resumed referrals to Pasadena General Hospital only after the hospital started paying $70 per patient (their referrals grew from 14 in one month to 82 in the next). As Rodwin writes, incentives such as this can inhibit a doctor from taking action when a hospital fails to provide proper service, and may also lead to the unnecessary hospitalization of patients. We also learn of a Wyeth-Ayerst Labs promotion in which physicians who started patients on INDERAL (a drug for high blood pressure, angina, and migraines) received 1000 mileage points on American Airlines for each patient (studies show that promotions such as this have a direct effect on a doctor's choice of drug). Rodwin reveals why the medical community has failed to regulate conflicts of interest: peer review has little authority, state licensing boards are usually ignorant of abuses, and the AMA code of ethics has historically been recommended rather than required. He examines what can be learned from the way society has coped with the conflicts of interest of other professionals --lawyers, government officials, and businessmen--all of which are held to higher standards of accountability than doctors. And he recommends that efforts be made to prohibit and regulate certain kinds of activity (such as kickbacks and self-referrals), to monitor and regulate conduct, and to provide penalties for improper conduct. Our failure to face physicians' conflicts of interest has distorted the way medicine is practiced, compromised the loyalty of doctors to patients, and harmed society, the integrity of the medical profession, and patients. For those concerned with the quality of health care or medical ethics, Medicine, Money and Morals is a provocative look into the current health care crisis and a powerful prescription for change. (shrink)

The heart of the matter -- The evolution of the French medicine -- Coping with physicians' conflicts of interest in France -- The rise of a protected medical market : the United States before 1950 -- The commercial transformation : the United States, 1950-1980 -- The logic of medical markets : the United States, 1980 to the present -- Coping with physicians' conflicts of interest in the United States -- The evolution of Japanese medicine -- Coping with physicians' conflicts of (...) interest in Japan -- Reforms -- Professionalism reconsidered. (shrink)

This book explores convergences and divergences between process thought and Roman Catholicism. It examines why process philosophy and process theology have had a minimal impact in Roman Catholic circles compared to Protestantism, and investigates avenues of promising engagement between process thought and Roman Catholicism.

Bernard Williams briefly discusses agent regret in his broader account of moral luck. The present paper first outlines one way to develop Williams’s notion with reference to the unintended harm; it then suggests that agent regret can be counteracted by externalizing the action that caused unintended harm, in Harry Frankfurt’s sense of externalization; and then the present paper argues that apology is a mechanism by which a person can externalize an offending action/effect—in that way counteracting agent regret. This function for (...) apology—self-repair—is different from others described in the literature, which address the role of apology in repairing relationships. The present paper describes a nonfictional example, that of a veteran of the U.S. war in Iraq who contacts a family gravely injured by him and his combat unit; the veteran is motivated to contact the family to apologize. The example serves as a prototypical case of agent regret. The example is taken from a recent literature on the clinical psychology of self-inflicted “moral injury”; categorizing this example of moral injury as agent regret also helps broaden our understanding of moral injury as a philosophical category and as a psychological phenomenon. (shrink)

The singular term theory maintains that that-clauses are complex singular terms which designate propositions. Though extremely well-supported, the theory is endangered by the existence of oblique that-clauses; that is, that-clauses occurring in what appear to be nonargument positions (e.g., ‘Lola was upset that Slick Willy had all the fun’). In this paper I argue that the best solution to the problem consistent with the singular term theory, invokes a construction-based grammatical theory. Such an approach challenges traditional views of semantic compositionality (...) by rejecting a central dogma of semantics, namely, that linguistic constructions contribute only trivial logical or quasi-logical information to semantic interpretation (e.g., function-application relations). (shrink)

George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, was an Irish philosopher and divine who pursued a number of grand causes, contributing to the fields of economics, mathematics, political theory and theology. He pioneered the theory of 'immaterialism', and his work ranges over many philosophical issues that remain of interest today. This volume offers a complete and accurate edition of Berkeley's extant correspondence, including letters written both by him and to him, supplemented by extensive explanatory and critical notes. Alexander Pope famously said 'To (...) Berkeley every virtue under heaven', and a careful reading of the letters reveals a figure worthy of admiration, sheds new light on his personal and intellectual life, and provides insight into the broad historical and philosophical currents of his time. The volume will be an invaluable resource for philosophers, modern historians and those interested in Anglo-Irish culture. (shrink)

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

This paper argues that Rawls’ principles of justice provide a normative foundation for stakeholder theory. The principles articulate (at an abstract level) citizens’ rights; these rights create interests across all aspects of society, including in the space of economic activity; and therefore, stakeholders – as citizens – have legitimate interests in the space of economic activity. This approach to stakeholder theory suggests a political interpretation of Boatright’s Moral Market approach, one that emphasizes the rights/place of citizens. And this approach to (...) stakeholder theory – in terms of citizens – raises a further question, what rights and obligations do economic agents have, beyond those attached to their roles as citizens? Rawls would reject additional rights and obligations of this sort for two reasons, one tied to freedom and one tied to pluralism. Rawls’ work therefore presses us to re-conceptualize the place of ethical claims in the economic context. (shrink)

Joseph Heath defends competitive markets and conceptualizes business ethics with reference to Pareto efficiency, which he takes to be the “implicit morality of the market.” His justification for markets is that they generate Pareto efficient outcomes, meaning that markets optimally satisfy consumer preferences. And, for Heath, business ethics is the set of normative constraints—regulation and beyond-compliance norms—needed to preserve that outcome. The present paper accepts Heath’s claim that the economic justification for markets is ethical, in that satisfying consumer preferences is (...) a good. But, contra Heath, the ethical consideration at work is a consequentialist one; and acknowledging this consequentialism exposes limitations of Heath’s “market failures” approach to business ethics. We suggest two limitations, and we expect many will accept our argument that Heath’s conception of business ethics is too narrow. The present paper outlines two broader implications. First, acknowledging that the justification for markets is ethical eliminates the apparent—and false—conflict between purportedly amoral economic activity on one hand and ethical considerations on the other; instead, business ethics is a matter of weighing the consequentialist ethical benefit of economic activity and markets against other moral arguments/other ethical considerations. Second, Heath restricts business ethics to the constraints needed to protect the market’s ability to efficiently satisfy consumer preferences, constraints he calls “efficiency imperatives”; this restriction supports the widespread tendency to think that all social problems are economic; and, a business ethics so-conceived diminishes the perceived importance of noneconomic values—this attitude is dangerous. (shrink)

Jared D. Harris, Brian T. Moriarty, and Andrew C. Wicks’ recent book collects eleven chapters by well-known scholars on the question of public trust in business, published along with an introduction and conclusion by the editors. But the collection doesn’t make progress on what this reviewer takes to be the two essential questions. This review outlines those questions and then addresses a further, more technical difficulty with the conceptualizations of trust at work across the chapters. The central theme here is (...) that business as an institution has obligations to society; we—the public—trust business to act on those obligations; and when business violates those obligations our trust is betrayed. The essays collected in this volume do not directly address the question of what those obligations are, but this should be the starting point for an investigation of public trust in business. (shrink)

The Food and Drug Administration authorizes the marketing of a drug only for uses that the manufacturer has demonstrated to be safe and effective, based on evidence from at least two clinical trials. However, the FDA does not regulate the practice of medicine, so physicians may prescribe drugs in any manner they choose. Prescribing drugs in ways that deviate from the uses specified in the FDA-approved drug label, package insert, and marketing authorization is referred to as off-label prescribing. This occurs (...) when physicians prescribe a drug for a therapeutic purpose other than the one approved by the FDA; treat patients in a different age cohort or gender than the population on which it was tested; or prescribe a different dose, for a different duration of use, or a different mode of administration than indicated on the label. (shrink)

Donald Davidson's work has been of seminal importance in the development of analytic philosophy and his views on the nature of language, mind and action remain the starting point for many of the central debates in the analytic tradition. His ideas, however, are complex, often technical, and interconnected in ways that can make them difficult to understand. This introduction to Davidson's philosophy examines the full range of his writings to provide a clear succinct overview of his ideas. This book begins (...) with an account of the assumptions and structure of Davidson's philosophy of language, introducing his compositionalism, extensionalism and commitment to a Tarski-style theory of truth as the model for theories of meaning. It goes on to show how that philosophical framework is to be applied and how it challenges the traditional picture. Marc Joseph examines Davidson's influential work on action theory and events and discusses the commonly made charge that his theory of action and mind leaves the mental as a mere 'epiphenomenon' of the physical. The final section explores Davidson's philosophy of mind, some of its consequences for traditional views of subjectivity and objectivity and, more generally, the relation between minded beings and the physical and mental world they occupy. (shrink)

Public policy tries to promote appropriate drug use by allowing firms to market drugs in interstate commerce only for uses that the Food and Drug Administration has found to be safe and effective. Because of their medical knowledge, physicians are authorized to prescribe drugs even for uses unapproved by the FDA. Nevertheless, physicians have relied on drug firms for information on appropriate prescribing despite the inherent tension between drug firm dissemination of information to promote sales and rational prescribing. In the (...) past, physicians often relied particularly on drug firm advertising for information on drug use. Today, physicians rely on drug firms to finance continuing medical education. A historical review reveals connections between these two different ways commercial interests have influenced the information that physicians receive and points the way to needed reforms. (shrink)

Joseph A. Bracken, S.J,. is one of the more significant North American theologians of the past 40 years. With 12 monographs, two edited or co-edited volumes, over 150 articles, numerous professional and popular conference presentations and media appearances, he is one of the foremost interlocutors in contemporary theological discourse. Having developed and consistently defended a comprehensive and intellectually rigorous worldview that combines the modern and classical Christian worldviews, Bracken has accomplished an invaluable service to the academy, the church, and the (...) world. He has not favored a particular theological or philosophical system, past or present. Instead, he culls what he judges to be true and good in a myriad of seemingly prima facie noncompossible thinkers and systems with divergent programs. Synthesizing the Catholic intellectual tradition and process-relational metaphysics, Bracken also incorporates aspects of German and Anglo-American Idealism, Pragmatism, recent philosophy of science, and a litany of past and present theologians and philosophers. The present volume is a Festschrift to honor Bracken’s career and accomplishments. It differs from the standard Festschrift genre in that the contributors, while certainly explicating and reflecting upon various aspects of his comprehensive worldview, offer their original contributions n a variety of topics. They do in dialogue with Bracken’s positions, simply as starting points, not as end points. The common theme of the Festschrift, then, is serious reflection on and in some cases critique of Bracken’s comprehensive process-relational, Catholic, and Trinitarian worldview and its pertinence for work in contemporary theology from a given perspective. Yet there is a certain richness coming from the diverse perspectives of the contributors whose work intersects with Bracken’s, and not always in terms of process thought per se. The contributors come from diverse backgrounds, not only in process and Roman Catholic theology but also including even other academic disciplines. They represent a balance of senior and junior scholars, and of genders. (shrink)

Several studies suggest that intrusive and overgeneral autobiographical memory are correlated. Thus, paradoxically, in some patients a hyperaccessibility of memory for one (series of) event(s) goes hand‐in‐hand with a scarcity of memories for other personal experiences. This clinical observation is reminiscent of the laboratory phenomenon of retrieval‐induced forgetting (RIF). This refers to the finding that repeatedly recalling some experimental stimuli impairs subsequent recall of related (i.e., tied to the same retrieval cue) stimuli. RIF of emotional autobiographical memories might provide an (...) experimental model for the clinical memory phenomena in question. The present paper reports two experiments that explored the merits of applying the retrieval practice paradigm to relatively broad categories of autobiographical memories. Both studies found a significant RIF effect in that practised memories were recalled better than unrelated unpractised (baseline) memories. In addition, unpractised memories that were related to the practised memories were recalled more poorly than baseline memories. Implications of these findings for modelling the co‐occurrence of intrusive and overgeneral memories are discussed. (shrink)

Why do physicians have financial conflicts of interest? They arise because society expects physicians to act in their patients’ interest, while simultaneously, financial incentives encourage physicians to practice medicine in ways that promote their own interests or those of third parties. Because physicians’ clinical choices, referrals, and prescriptions affect the fortune of third parties, these third parties may offer physicians financial incentives to make income-driven clinical choices. In the past, physicians and scholars typically conceived of conflicts of interest as an (...) ethical issue to be resolved according to individual judgment or professional and organizational norms. However, society can mitigate or eliminate conflicts of interest by changing financial and organizational arrangements in medicine. Conflicts of interest, therefore, are as much matters of public policy and management as individual choices or social norms. (shrink)

This work studies early modern thought concerning the ontology of ideas. I endeavor to establish, contrary to some current scholarship, that the Early Moderns remained firmly in the grip of a substance/mode ontology narrowed from the substance/property distinction inherited from Aristotle. I argue that this traditional dichotomy provides the most philosophically and historically fruitful approach to understanding early modern thought. In particular, I demonstrate how the increasing radicalization in the metaphysics of the moderns is best explained by remaining within the (...) substance/mode ontology. Competing contemporary approaches, especially ones that attempt to employ concepts such as reification and object talk in place of the traditional ontology, do not sufficiently penetrate to the core issues facing the Moderns. Rather than seeking to abandon the categories of substance and mode, the Moderns sought, perhaps vainly, to find room for ideas within it. I proceed by providing background from Aristotle and the Medievals, go on to discuss the philosophical views of Descartes, Malebranche, Arnauld, Locke and Berkeley. The development of idea philosophy culminates in Berkeley, who creates a hybrid ontic category I call 'quasi-substance.' Ideas for Berkeley are ontically dependent on minds , but external to them in the sense that the relationship between ideas and minds are two-place . I demonstrate how this understanding explains the radical metaphysical positions he takes, especially his commitment to perceptual heterogeneity. I conclude that rather than abandoning the traditional ontic categories, the Moderns adhered to them desperately, and thus are best understood through them. (shrink)

The Problem of Doxastic Shift may be stated as a dilemma: on the one hand, the distribution of nominal complements of the form `the ψ that p’ strongly suggests that `that’-clauses cannot be univocally assigned propositionaldenotations; on the other hand, facts about quantification strongly suggest that `that’-clauses must be assigned univocal denotations. I argue that the Problem may be solved by defining the extension of a proposition to be a set of facts or, more generally, conditions. Given this, the logical (...) operation of descriptive predication can be introduced in a way that resolves the dilemma withoutsacrificing the singular term analysis of `that’-clauses. (shrink)

There are two constraints on any functionalist solution to the Mind-Body Problem construed as an answer to the question, “What is the relationship between the mental properties and relations (hereafter, simply the mental properties) and physical properties and relations?” The first constraint is that it must actually address the Mind-Body Problem and not simply redefine the debate in terms of other, more tractable, properties (e.g., the species-specific property of having human-pain). Such moves can be seen to be spurious by the (...) very multiple-realizability intuitions that motivate functionalism in the first place. For, according to those intuitions, it is possible for a being to experience pain, have beliefs, etcetera, and yet not only to be of a different species, but to have an entirely different material constitution from human beings. (shrink)

Across the management, social science, and business ethics literatures, and in much of the philosophy literature, trust is characterized as a disposition to act given epistemic states—beliefs and/or expectations about others and about the risks involved. This characterization of trust is best thought of as epistemological because epistemic states distinguish trust from other dispositions. The epistemological characterization of trust is the amoral one referred to in the title of this paper, and we argue that this characterization is conceptually inadequate. We (...) outline and defend an alternative conception of trust as a moral phenomenon: when A trusts B to do something, A invites B to acknowledge and accept an obligation; when B accepts the invitation, B takes on an obligation; in that way trust creates an obligation. We conclude with an application, drawing out the difference between the epistemological conception of trust and our own in the context of Ghoshal et al.'s (Sloan Management Review 40:9—20, 1995, Academy of Management Learning & Education 4:75—91, 2005) critique of transaction cost theories of the firm. (shrink)

According to recent literature in philosophy and psychology, there is a set of basic emotions that were preserved over the course of evolution because they serve adaptive functions. However, the empirical evidence fails to support the claim that there are basic emotions because it fails to show that emotions can be identified with specific functions. Moreover, work on basic emotions lacks the conceptual space to take emotional experience into account and so fails to amount to an adequate theory of emotion: (...) in the literature basic emotions are identified with emotional responses, but these responses — even if they did exist as characterized — are not emotions or emotional. That said, recent empirical discoveries about the brain structures responsible for emotional responses, discoveries that are often cited in the basic emotions literature, nevertheless form the foundation for a comprehensive theory of emotion — a theory that is broadly Jamesian in that an emotion is the experience and interpretation of a prior, physiological response. (shrink)

I draw attention to a group of thinkers in Ireland in the first half of the eighteenth century that made significant contributions to the philosophy of political economy. Loosely organized around the Dublin Philosophical Society founded in 1731, these individuals employed a similar set of assumptions and shared a common interest in the well-being of the Irish people. I focus on Samuel Madden (1686-1765), Arthur Dobbs (1689-1765), and Thomas Prior (1680–1751) and argue for two main theses. First, these Irish thinkers (...) shared a number of commonalities with the English mercantilist thinkers of the eighteenth century, and to the degree that they did, their proposals to aid Ireland and reduce poverty were largely doomed to failure. Second, these Irish thinkers also importantlydivergedfrom typical eighteenth-century mercantilist thinking in several ways. These modifications to mercantilism resulted in large part from the unusual political situation of Ireland (as a nation politically dependent on England) and helped orient their economic thinking along more institutional lines. In particular, the emphasis of the Irish on full employment and on the modification of social as well as political institutions is an early step forward in making political economy more sophisticated. (shrink)

The most recent restatements of stakeholder theory formulate that approach in terms of the distribution of value: “A stakeholder approach to business is about creating as much value as possible for stakeholders, without resorting to tradeoffs” (Freeman et al. 2010: 28). This formulation marks a shift from earlier work, which included a procedural dimension—a requirement that stakeholders participate in organization decision making. The present paper pushes back against this shift: it argues that orienting the stakeholder approach around the participation requirement (...) provides for a different moral logic, one not available to (now) conventional stakeholder theorizing (without that requirement), and one that may be more compelling to many. This argument requires critical re-examination of the moral arguments offered in the most recent restatements of the stakeholder approach. (shrink)

: Establishing and defending the Christian faith serves as both a guide and a limit to Berkeley's intriguing metaphysics. I take Berkeley seriously when he says that his aim is to promote the consideration of God and the truth of Christianity. In this paper I discuss and engage Berkeley's superficially weak argument (which I call the natural analogy argument) in defense of the plausibility of the doctrine of bodily resurrection. When his immaterialist resources are properly applied, the argument has more (...) merit than one might initially believe. I conclude by speculating that Berkeley had reason to believe that immaterialism was a better fit with Christianity than materialism. (shrink)

When A wrongs B while C observes, or when B tells C afterward, C might apologize. This could seem to be an imprecise or merely metaphorical use of the word ‘apology’ to refer to an expression of sympathy. But this short paper explains how third-party apologies function as apologies (they restore respect to B, the victim, that was undermined by the wrongdoer A); it explains why such an apology could be morally necessary on C's part; and it provides a preliminary (...) account of the components of a third-party apology. (shrink)