Reprint of the original, first published in 1919.

Book reviewed in this article: Just Doctoring: Medical Ethics in the Liberal State. By Troyen A. Brennan. The Ends of Human Life: Medical Ethics in a Liberal Polity. By Ezekiel J. Emanuel.

Some people will confront Alzheimer's with a measure of resignation, a determination to struggle against the progressive debilitation and to extract whatever comforts and benefits they can from their remaining existence. They are entitled to pursue that resolute path. For other people, like myself, protracted maintenance during progressive cognitive dysfunction and helplessness is an intolerably degrading prospect. The critical question for those of us seeking to avoid protracted dementia is how best to accomplish that objective.One strategy is to engineer one's (...) own death while still mentally competent to do so (even in the stage of mild dementia). If I were to use a preemptive strategy in the face of a dementia diagnosis, I would probably choose to stop eating and drinking, a process known as voluntarily stopping eating and drinking. An alternative tactic for avoiding prolonged dementia would be to allow oneself to decline into moderate dementia—thus losing capacity to perform self‐deliverance or even to make serious medical decisions—but before getting to that point to provide advance instructions rejecting prospective life‐sustaining medical interventions. These advance instructions would authorize palliative but not curative measures. My current personal instructions define the point of intolerable cognitive decline triggering medical nonintervention as “mental deterioration to a point when I can no longer read and understand written material such as a newspaper or financial records such as a checkbook.” These instructions dictate allowing my demise at a point of moderate dementia when I may not be perceptibly suffering, when I may still be getting some rudimentary satisfaction from my debilitated life, and when I no longer recall the preoccupation with personally intolerable indignity that motivated my instructions. Can I expect that my advance instructions will be implemented in those circumstances? Is it lawful, and is it moral for a surrogate decision‐maker and associated caregivers to allow an uncomprehending, ostensibly content but demented individual to die? My analysis herein contends that it is not only lawful and moral but also legally required to implement clear, considered advance instructions even at a stage of moderate dementia. (shrink)

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls defines a hypothetical contract situation and argues rational people will agree on reflection it is fair to contractors. He solves the rational choice problem it poses by deriving two lexically-ordered principles of justice and suggests the derivation justifies the principles. Its soundness aside, just what justificatory force does such a derivation have?On one view, there is no justificatory force because the contract is rigged specifically to yield principles which match our pre-contract moral judgments. (...) Rawls provides ammunition for this claim: “By going back and forth, sometimes altering the conditions of the contractual circumstances, at others withdrawing our judgments [about what is just] and conforming them to principle, I assume that eventually we shall find a description of the initial situation that both expresses reasonable conditions and yields principles which match our considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted.”. (shrink)

Abstract:The literature contains many recommendations, both explicit and implicit, that suggest how an ethics program ought to be designed. While we recognize the contributions of these works, we also note that these recommendations are typically based on either social scientific theory or data and as a result they tend to discount the moral aspects of ethics programs. To contrast and complement these approaches, we refer to a theory of the right to identify the characteristics of an effective ethics program. We (...) draw from Kant’s ethical theory to identify three guiding principles of a moral ethics program and then apply those principles to the specific components of ethics programs as discussed in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Doing so provides insights as to how an ethics program ought to be designed from a moral point of view and sparks discussion of the moral aspects of ethics programs. (shrink)

Over-enthusiastic newborn screening has often caused substantial harm and has been imposed on the public without adequate information on benefits and risks and without parental consent. This problem will become worse when genomic screening is implemented. For the past 40 years, there has been broad agreement about the criteria for ethically responsible screening, but the criteria have been systematically ignored by policy makers and practitioners. Claims of high benefit and low risk are common, but they require precise definition and documentation, (...) which has often not occurred, undermining claims that involuntary testing is justified. Even when the benefits and risks are well established, it does not automatically follow that involuntary testing is justified, a position supported by the widespread tolerance for parental refusal of immunizations and newborn screening. (shrink)

This book critically examines the debate on Martin Heidegger's concept of Entscheidung and his engagement and confrontation with Nazism in terms of his broader philosophical thought. It argues that one cannot explain Heidegger's actions without accounting for his idea of "decision" and its connection to his understanding of individual "fate" and national "destiny." The book looks at the relation of biography to philosophy and the ethical and political implications of appropriating Heidegger's thinking in these domains of inquiry. It highlights themes (...) such as Heidegger's differences with the neo-Kantians in Germany; Heidegger on Kant and practical reason; and his reading of Nietzsche and Hegel. It offers a philosophical assessment grounded in Heidegger's own texts, with reference to historical and other philosophical commentaries on the rise of National Socialism in post-Weimar Germany and the philosophical issues associated with the interpretation of Nazi genocide and ideology. An important intervention in Western philosophy, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of political philosophy, continental philosophy, German philosophy, philosophy in general, and political studies. (shrink)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Von Schelling (1775-1854) was a colleague of Hegel, Holderlin, Fichte, Goethe, Schlegel, and Schiller. Always a champion of Romanticism, Schelling advocated a philosophy which emphasized intuition over reason, which maintained aesthetics and the creative imagination to be of the highest value. At the same time, Schelling's concerns for the self and the rational make him a major precursor to existentialism and phenomenology. Schelling has exercised a subterranean influence on modern thought. His diverse writings have not given rise (...) to a system or school of thought; rather, individual philosophers have been influenced by the resonance of his ideas and their influence on contemporary ideas and movements. The New Schelling brings together a wide-ranging set of essays which elaborate the connections between Schelling and other thinkers - such as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Deleuze, and Lacan - and argue for the unexpected modernity of Schelling's work. (shrink)

Both Aristotle and Kierkegaard show that virtues result, in part, from training which produces distinctive patterns of salience. The "frame problem" in AI shows that rationality requires salience. Salience is a function of cares and desires (passions) and thus governs choice in much the way Aristotle supposes when he describes choice as deliberative desire. Since rationality requires salience it follows that rationality requires passion. Thus Kierkegaard is no more an irrationalist in ethics than is Aristotle, though he continues to be (...) charged with irrationalism. The compatibility of an Aristotelian reading of Kierkegaard with the "suspension of the ethical" and general problems with aretaic ethical theories are treated briefly. The author argues that it is possible to preserve a realist ethics in the face of the "tradition relativism" which threatens the version of virtue ethics here attributed to Kierkegaard. (shrink)

Richard Rorty has proposed the hypothesis that those who came to the rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe are more likely to have been moved to help by parochialist sorts of consideration — sympathy for a colleague, fellow national, and the like — than they are by universalist motives having to do with the proper treatment of human beings. Although inconclusive on many other points, the research on rescuer behaviour during the Holocaust embodies a consensus contrary to Rorty's hypothesis; and (...) extensive reference to the rescuers’own testimony supports that consensus. (shrink)

Nach Leibniz sind es die Summe und das Zusammenspiel der, wie er sie nennt, perceptions insensibles (nicht-wahrnehmbare Perzeptionen), die die (wahrnehmbaren) Perzeptionen begründen. Nicht-wahrnehmbare Perzeptionen bilden für ihn eine Voraussetzung für bewusste Zustände und sind konstitutiv für menschliche Individuen. Mit Blick auf die gegenwärtige Neurowissenschaft argumentieren wir dafür, dass neuronale Hirnaktivitäten als die physikalischen Analoga im Sinne Leibnizens solcher nicht-wahrnehmbaren Perzeptionen interpretiert werden können. Ergebnisse neurophysiologischer Forschung, denen zufolge bestimmte Hirnaktivitäten bewussten (wiederabrufbaren) Zuständen zeitlich vorausgehen, wären dementsprechend klarerweise zu erwarten. (...) Aus diesen und anderen Gründen halten wir den Leibniz'schen Ansatz für eine nützliche und wertvolle Grundlage, um neurophysiologische Ergebnisse in einem Rahmen diskutieren und beurteilen zu können, der über den rein innerphysiologischen hinausgeht. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the role that the concept of the sacred can play in our moral thinking. I accept that the assertion that ‘human life is sacred’ can be one way of articulating the special value of individual human lives as in some sense inviolable. I cautiously allow that the idea of ‘sacred value’ might also apply to other things such as certain kinds of human commitments, uniquely precious art-works, and some other kinds of living things. In conclusion (...) I offer reasons for resisting the claim, made especially by Roger Scruton, that the experience of the sacred, when properly understood, draws us ineluctably into a religious view of the world. (shrink)

This paper aims at closing a gap in recent Weyl research by investigating the role played by Leibniz for the development and consolidation of Weyl's notion of theoretical (symbolic) construction. For Weyl, just as for Leibniz, mathematics was not simply an accompanying tool when doing physics – for him it meant the ability to engage in well-guided speculations about a general framework of reality and experience. The paper first introduces some of the background of Weyl's notion of theoretical construction and (...) then discusses particular Leibnizian inheritances in Weyl's Philosophie der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaft, such as the general appreciation of the principles of sufficient reason and of continuity. Afterwards the paper focuses on three themes: first, Leibniz's primary quality phenomenalism, which according to Weyl marked the decisive step in realizing that physical qualities are never apprehended directly; second, the conceptual relation between continuity and freedom; and third, Leibniz's notion of ‘expression’, which allows for a certain type of (surrogative) reasoning by structural analogy and which gave rise to Weyl's optimism regarding the scope of theoretical construction. (shrink)

It has been argued by Hull and others that a remnant of essentialism impeded taxonomic progress until systematists abandoned attempting to define taxa on the basis of characters necessary and sufficient for group membership. The advent of cladistics suggests instead that it is an essentialistic view of characters, not of taxa, that should be abandoned, and that only a transformational view of characters allows evolutionary novelties to be identified, much less explained. Conventional Darwinian explanations are not tautologous but are difficult (...) to test and scarcely explain evolutionary novelties, probably because of their emphasis on genetic rather than epigenetic (developmental) processes. (shrink)

I make no apology for what is by now a hackneyed title. It derives, of course, from Croce’s book on Hegel, and I choose it because I want to suggest that the question ‘What is living and what is dead in Marxism?’ is the right question to ask. The analytical approach is appropriate if it means distinguishing and discriminating between different aspects of Marxism, and refusing to reject or embrace it en bloc as a monolithic creed. However, this does not (...) mean that Marxism can be chopped up into a number of disconnected theses, with a view to producing an inventory of those which are true and those which are false. Marxism claims to be a systematic theory, whose various elements hang together in an organised way. Some would say that this creates an unbridgeable gulf between Marxist and analytical philosophies. Nevertheless, though Marxism’s claim to be systematic should be taken seriously, there are different readings of the theory and of how its components are connected, and different versions will see different elements as central. This is where the careful discrimination of meanings and interpretations is needed. It is not simply a question of deciding whether each of the various elements, in isolation, is true or false, more a matter of deciding where the emphasis should lie if Marxism is to continue to illuminate our understanding of the social world. It is in this sense that we can talk about Marxism or any other theory as ‘living’ — not just as containing true assertions, but as being capable of playing a vital and creative role in human thought and action. In what version, then, if any, is Marxism a living philosophy? (shrink)

1. Thoroughgoing TeleologyAquinas concludes his introductory chapter by announcing that his first task in Book III, a task to which he devotes sixty-two chapters, is to investigate “God himself in so far as he is the end of all things” (1.1867b). That compressed description of a very big topic is likely to arouse some misgivings. Why should we think that absolutely all things do have ends or goals? Even if we’re given good reasons to think that they do, why should (...) we think that all those ends or goals converge in a single end for all things? And even if we should be convinced of that, why should we think that that single universal end must be identified (somehow) as God himself? (shrink)

1. The Aims of the BookThis book is the third in a series of three volumes. In 1997 and 1999, Oxford’s Clarendon Press published my books The Metaphysics of Theism and The Metaphysics of Creation, which are related, respectively, to Books I and II of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles (SCG) as this book is to Book III.1.

Marx's Rebellion Against Lenin is a representative of the contemporary revitalization of the thought of Marx. It fulfils this task in three ways. First, it overthrows the dialectical materialism of Engels and of Stalinist Bolshevism by exploring 18th century historical thought and illustrating how these Enlightenment historians and political theorists first explored method of historical explanation that were later adopted by Marx. It is shown that contrary to the theory of Stalinist Bolshevism, Hegel was a vital influence on Marx. Second, (...) Levine's book represents Marx as an exponent of Classical Humanism. Marx did not define communism as a form of materialism, as economic egalitarianism, but rather related communism to the Classical ethics of Aristotle, to the Aristotelian ideas of polis citizenship and the ethics of distributive justice. Third, it is argued that the 17th and 18th Century Enlightenment was not simply a liberal center extolling property, individual rights and capitalism. Instead it is shown that the 17th and 18th century Enlightenment was divided between an Enlightenment Center and an Enlightenment Left, with the Enlightenment Left challenging the domination of capitalism and private property. Marx's Rebellion Against Lenin traces the flow of the theories of the Enlightenment Left into Marx and in doing so liberates Marxist thought from its imprisonment in 19th century materialism and relocates it within the traditions of Classical Humanism. (shrink)

Arguments are examined, reexamined, challenged, and honed in this lively dialogue on relativism and objectivity. Topics considered include whether truth and goodness are matters determined by individual opinion; whether they are defined by cultures; whether a non-dogmatic form of relativism is viable; whether the objectivity of science escapes relativism; and pragmatism as an alternative to relativism. Designed to present beginning students with an introduction to the main arguments concerning relativism, this provocative dialogue also serves as a model for thinking clearly (...) about philosophical issues. (shrink)

Catalogue of the Hugh Nevill Collection of Sinhalese Manuscripts in the British Library. K. D. Somadasa. Pali Text Society and the British Library. Vol. 1, 1987. xi, 440 pp. £22.00. Vol. 2, 1989. vii, 316 pp. £24.95.