Many western industrialized countries are currently suffering from a crisis in health human resources, one that involves a debate over the recruitment and licensing of foreign-trained doctors and nurses. The intense public policy interest in foreign-trained medical personnel, however, is not new. During the 1960s, western countries revised their immigration policies to focus on highly-trained professionals. During the following decade, hundreds of thousands of health care practitioners migrated from poorer jurisdictions to western industrialized countries to solve what were then deemed (...) to be national doctor and nursing 'shortages' in the developed world. Migration plummeted in the 1980s and 1990s only to re-emerge in the last decade as an important debate in global health care policy and ethics. This paper will examine the historical antecedents to this ethical debate. It will trace the early articulation of the idea of a 'brain drain', one that emerged from the loss of NHS doctors to other western jurisdictions in the 1950s and 1960s. Only over time did the discussion turn to the 'manpower' losses of 'third world countries', but the inability to track physician migration, amongst other variables, muted any concerted ethical debate. By contrast, the last decade's literature has witnessed a dramatically different ethical framework, informed by globalization, the rise of South Africa as a source donor country, and the ongoing catastrophe of the AIDS epidemic. Unlike the literature of the early 1970s, recent scholarship has focussed on a new framework of global ethics. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with everyday data practices, considering how people record data produced through self-monitoring. The analysis unpacks the relationships between taking a measure, and making and reviewing records. The paper is based on an interview study with people who monitor their blood pressure and/or body mass index/weight. Animated by discussions of ‘data power’ which are, in part, predicated on the flow and aggregation of data, we aim to extend important work concerning the everyday constitution of digital data. In (...) the paper, we adopt and develop the idea of curation as a theory of attention. We introduce the idea of discerning work to characterise the skilful judgements people make about which readings they record, how readings are presented, and about the records they retain and those they discard. We suggest self-monitoring produces partial data, both in the sense that it embodies these judgements, and also because monitoring might be conducted intermittently. We also extend previous analyses by exploring the broad set of materials, digital and analogue, networked and not networked, involved in record keeping to consider the different ways these contributed to regulating attention to self-monitoring. By paying attention to which data is recorded and the occasions when data is not recorded, as well as the ways data is recorded, the research provides specificity to the different ways in which self-monitoring data may or may not flow or contribute to big data sets. We argue that ultimately our analysis contributes to nuancing our understanding of ‘data power’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Most of what we believe comes to us from the word of others, but we do not always believe what we are told. We often reject thinkers' reports by attributing biases to them. We may call this debunking. In this essay, I consider how debunking might work and then examine whether, and how often, it can help to preserve rational belief in the face of disagreement.

In this discussion I shall argue that some fairly widely held views about human habits are mistaken. These misconceptions are important because of the pervasiveness of the habitual in human behavior and because it is the concept of habit that has served as the prototype of various conceptions of conditioned response which are used in psychological explanation. One major task of this analysis is to show that accounts in which actions are explained by reference to rules are not incompatible with (...) accounts in which the same behavior is seen as the product of habit. (shrink)

I’ll raise a problem for Retributivism, the view that legal punishment is justified on the basis of desert. I’ll focus primarily on Mitchell Berman’s recent defense of the view. He gives one of the most sophisticated and careful statements of it. And his argument is representative, so the problem I’ll raise for it will apply to other versions of Retributivism. His insights about justification also help to make the problem particularly obvious. I’ll also show how the problem extends to non-retributive (...) justifications of punishment. I’ll argue that Berman’s argument makes a questionable assumption about the standard of justification that justifications of punishment must meet to be successful. If we think about what it takes to justify punishment and reflect on the intuitions that retributivists appeal to, it turns out that the intuitions aren’t obviously up to the task. (shrink)

Carl Cohen's arguments against animal rights are shown to be unsound. His strategy entails that animals have rights, that humans do not, the negations of those conclusions, and other false and inconsistent implications. His main premise seems to imply that one can fail all tests and assignments in a class and yet easily pass if one's peers are passing and that one can become a convicted criminal merely by setting foot in a prison. However, since his moral principles imply that (...) nearly all exploitive uses of animals are wrong anyway, foes of animal rights are advised to seek philosophical consolations elsewhere. I note that some other philosopher's arguments are subject to similar objections. (shrink)

The ethics of policing currently neglects to provide a framework for analysing the morality of deliberate inactions to prevent harm, even though these are often adopted tactically by police as a means of preventing greater harms. In this paper we argue (a) that police have special moral obligations to prevent harm, grounded both in a contractarian account of police legitimacy and in the interpersonal morality of associations and (b) that police are morally culpable for failures to fulfil these special obligations (...) when these are neither proportionate nor necessary to the prevention of greater crime-related harms. Our claims have implications both for the morality of policing and for its regulation and governance under human rights legislation, which we argue should be reformed so as to recognise police culpability not only for inflictions of harm, but also for failures to prevent it. (shrink)

This essay presents a model-theoretic account of dispositional properties, according to which dispositions are not ordinary properties of real entities; dispositions capture the behavior of abstract, idealized models. This account has several payoffs. First, it saves the simple conditional analysis of dispositions. Second, it preserves the general connection between dispositions and regularities, despite the fact that some dispositions are not grounded in actual regularities. Finally, it brings together the analysis and the explanation of dispositions under a unified framework.

In “The Tensed or Tensless Existence of Nature” Alexsander Jokic attempts to defend a new version A. N. Prior’s “Thank Goodness It’sOver” argument against my response to it. Jokic argues that we can give a non-circular account of ceasing to exist that will vindicate the new reading, but I argue that his account to rescue Prior’s argument against my criticism fails.

The UK’s 2014 Immigration Act aimed to create a ‘Hostile Environment’ for migrants to the UK. One aspect of this was the restriction of access to secondary care for overseas visitors to the UK, although it remains the case that everybody living in the UK has the legal right to access primary care. In this paper, we argue that the effects of this policy extend beyond secondary care, including preventing eligible people from registering with a General Practice, although as an (...) unintended consequence. This problem arises from misinterpretation of policy wording, misleading GP websites and gatekeeping behaviour from front-line staff, even though there are no grounds in the current guidelines or law to support this. Free access to primary healthcare among refugees and asylum seekers living in deprived populations is particularly important in protecting patient health, given the burden of ill-health in this population and the multiple barriers to accessing early intervention they face. The medical profession has a duty to communicate their rights to this patient group—their legal entitlement to access free healthcare, and the vital importance of doing so. (shrink)

Samuel Coleridge once noted that very short works of art ease the cognitive burden on poet and reader alike. Limiting the number of lines in a poem, he contends, allows the work 'to acquire, as it were, a Totality' which allows the reader's mind to 'rest satisfied'. Anyone who has strained to grasp the overall pattern of some massive novel, film, or musical work can readily appreciate Coleridge's point. And yet insofar as a film or poem is a temporal work (...) of art, the parts of which are manifested only consecutively, its Totality - be it an ever so small one - is never directly presented to us all at once, and its acquisition, as well as the satisfaction such an acquisition can provide, requires a feat of memory. A film, like a life, may have a brilliant, simple order and a deep and powerful unity, but the presentation and realization of such a totality is something that takes place in time, something that requires an experience of temporal unfolding - something that requires the work of a mind capable of thinking through and recollecting the temporal relations between the parts of the whole. So that while Marianne Olsen Ulrichsen's Come is a perfectly unified gem, a satisfying totality that presents itself to us in just four and a half minutes, we must nonetheless live through its unfolding to discover the coherence of its parts. One of this film's central themes is precisely this kind of process, namely, the constitution of personal identity and togetherness, in and through time and memory. What follows is just one story that may be told about an elusive process that no doubt takes very different forms for different viewers. (shrink)

Although this distinguished Harvard professor is primarily known for his groundbreaking work in modal logic, his rarely cited contributions to aesthetics include an account of aesthetic experience as well as an early articulation of a contextualist position in the ontology of artistic and aesthetic objects. Lewies discussion of these topics occupies two chapters of his 1946 treatise, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation.

A discussion conducted by Brubacher to see the fifth grade perspective on lacking accountability in an educational setting, along with a common link to philosophical grounds.

Zagzebski’s paper ends with a passage from Iris Murdoch. While the character in the passage is Kant, who recognizes the sounds of the moral law as coming from “the voice of his own reason,” (p. 22) Murdoch’s message seems to be directed to anyone who accepts a “secular” ethic. We can understand her message as a warning: DO NOT reject theistic or Christian ethics; DO NOT fail to view Christ as the source of the moral law, for this rejection is (...) (if I understand Murdoch correctly) one of the first steps down the road to Hell. I will argue that Christians should take these first steps down this road (and, if fact, ride the slippery slope all the way down), but that this road is not the road to Hell. It’s the moral road that Christians should want to be on. (shrink)

The main feature of any type of dialectic seems to be a drive for totalities or wholes, that is to say, a drive towards a synoptic view. This might be realized in various forms, either in systems of thought or in systems embracing both thought and being. The well known formal features of dialectic, that is to say, the contradiction of concepts, is but an indication that the inner movement--as Hegel put it--of concepts in their development toward the establishment or (...) manifestation of the whole takes place through and because of concepts. (shrink)

1. The relationship established between God and possibility on the one hand and the aspect of realization on the other is, in a way, an explication of the Aristotelian position. Though Professor Weiss does not proceed along strict Aristotelian lines--in view of the fact that he does not put forth the doctrine that realization has to precede possibility--he still holds an Aristotelian view in the sense that for him possibility has no self-sufficient, independent ontological status, but must find its supplement (...) and complement in reality--in this context, in God. (shrink)

Elementary particles, regarded as the constituents of quarks and leptons, are described classically in the framework of the general relativity theory. There are neutral particles and particles having charges±1/3e. They are taken to be spherically symmetric and to have mass density, pressure, and (if charged) charge density. They are characterized by an equation of state P=−ρ suggested by earlier work on cosmology. The neutral particle has a very simple structure. In the case of the charged particle there is one outstanding (...) model described by a simple analytic solution of the field equations. (shrink)

A classical model of an elementary particle is considered in the framework of the bimetric general relativity theory. The particle is regarded as a spherically symmetric object filling its Schwarzschild sphere and made of matter having mass density, pressure, and charge density. The mass is taken to be the Planck mass, and possible values of the charge are taken as zero, ±1/3e, ±2/3e, and ±e, with e the electron charge.

As against the analysis of the structure of the actual entities we find a different kind of analysis in Whitehead: that of the constitutive elements of the entities. "Such formative elements are not themselves actual and passing... They constitute the formative character of the actual and temporal world." This kind of analysis, being an analysis of elements, destroys the integral essence of the actual entities. The Platonic attitude of Whitehead's theory becomes manifest in the fact that the formative elements which (...) are discovered through removing life and temporality from the actual entities are not just abstract concepts. They are entities of a particular ontological status of their own. With those formative elements Whitehead lists: creativity, that is to say, that feature of the actual entities which provides for the temporal passage; the ideal entities or forms which characterize the actual entities and provide the potentialities which lie ahead of them; God, the entity whereby the indetermination of mere creativity is transmuted into a determinate freedom, the entity which directs the shift from mere creativity to a specific conjunction of eternal objects and actual occasions. (shrink)

The dynamic aspect of Whitehead's doctrine leads him not only to reject the firstness of the subject, but also to make the subject emerge out of an encounter between the datum and the feelings; and what is united in the subject becomes a late or progressive attainment. There are actually stressed two priorities as against the secondarity of the subject: the priority of the datum and that of the feeling. The term "superject" connotes in this context the emerging quality of (...) the unity of the subject, its going beyond the datum towards the unity. "The feelings are inseparable from the end at which they aim; and this end is the feeler". (shrink)

There are at least two models of what it is to be a feminist ethicist or moral philosopher. One model requires that one accept a distinctively feminist ethical theory. I will argue against this model by arguing that since the concept of a feminist ethical theory is highly unclear, any claim that ethicists who are feminist need one is also unclear and inadequately defended. I will advocate what I call a "minimal model" of feminist ethics, arguing that it is philosophically (...) and practically sufficient to meet feminist goals. (shrink)