This book considers whether there is a legitimate or even necessary place for the perspective of 'care' when addressing questions of universal justice. To this end, it examines two major frameworks of contemporary moral philosophy_Jürgen Habermas's model of discourse ethics and Jacques Derrida's deconstructive ethics of radical singularity_in which the contrasting standpoints of communicative reciprocation and care for the absolute otherness of the other are respectively prioritized.

Compilation of letters writings on Jaina spiritual life and philosophy.

This article endeavors to draw out and explicate some of the normative tensions that animate the imaginary and practice of solidarity. It begins by examining the account of solidarity set forth in the writings of Jürgen Habermas. It then considers Axel Honneth’s recognition-theoretic conception of the solidaristic attitude. While remaining sympathetic to the left-Hegelian intersubjectivism of Habermas’ discourse-ethic, Honneth seeks to redress the “cognitive-centric” limitations of the latter thinker’s conception of solidarity. In this context, particular emphasis is placed on Honneth’s (...) engagement with the idea of Sittlichkeit, or shared form of ethical life, discussed in Hegel’s early “Jena period” work, as well as in his later Elements of the Philosophy of Right. To Honneth, while these writings can contribute significantly to a recognition-theoretic understanding of solidarity, they must be distinguished from the philosophy of consciousness that circumscribes the famous recognition struggle between master and slave in The Phenomenology of Spirit. In conclusion, the paper questions the capacity of Honneth’s approach to criticize ideological forms of solidaristic recognition, offering a qualified defense of Habermas’ contravening perspective. (shrink)

Jain philosophical treatise with a commentary of Hemacandra Sūri, 12th cent.

Human Rights through the Lens of Cultural Particularities: What Alternative? While the proclaimed universality of human rights is a guarantee of security and protection for every human being, its implementation faces several cultural roadblocks. This paper clearly posits that the transcendent aspect of universality creates legal foreignness. We postulate that this foreignness is the source of particularistic hatred against the universality of human rights. In the light of this hypothesis, which is illustrated by excisions, this study recommends a translation of (...) the universal language of human rights into local cultural contexts. Such a translation constitutes an effective antidote to any particularistic approach, because we believe that it creates space for shared responsibility towards universality. In this regard, this paper intends to rethink the very foundation of the universality of human rights as rooted in order to eventually demonstrates the relevance of its translation into local cultural contexts. The transcendent vision of human rights (and law in general) is therefore complemented by their taking root perception by the societies they seek to govern. Otherwise, these rights will always be perceived as extraneous values at the endogenous level of cultures. Hence their ineffectiveness. (shrink)

Because health care professions exist to provide a good for society, ethical questions are inherently part of them. Such professions and their members can be assessed based on how effective they are in developing knowledge and enacting practices that further the health and well‐being of individuals and society. The complexity of contemporary health care environments makes it important to prepare clinicians who can anticipate, recognize, and address problems that arise in practice or that prevent a profession from fulfilling its service (...) goals and obligations. Different health care professions have evolved distinct perspectives about appropriate goals for, and the purposes of, their clinicians, even when the goal of improving health and well‐being for society is shared across professions. While medicine and nursing goals are shared in principle, they differ in the particulars. Given the centrality to nursing of ethical questions, the profession has a collective responsibility to help clinicians at all levels of practice become ethically savvy and to reinforce their moral agency as needed. Both knowledge of nursing ethics and knowledge of the interdisciplinary field of bioethics are critical to nursing work. (shrink)

Establishes that being in partnership with Nature is our birthright, explores the roots of our separation, and demonstrates that we are designed to communicate with Nature. Offers six principles of co-creative partnership with Nature that serve as a map for guiding us back to our rightful place as a part of Nature. Explains that plants can guide us in living according to our true essential nature and details the steps of creating and facilitating a plant initiation with common plants.

Advances in life-sustaining medical technology as applied to neonatal cases frequently present ethical concerns with a strong emotional component. Neonates delivered in the gestation period of approximately 23held hostagemoral distress” regarding aggressive courses of treatment for some patients. Some of this distress results from a feeling of powerlessness regarding treatment decisions, coupled with a high intensity of hands-on contact with the patients and family. Lack of authority coupled with high responsibility may itself be a recipe for a different kind of (...) futility. (shrink)

Issues surrounding the inclusion of transgender and intersex athletes in the women’s category in sport have spurred vigorous, and sometimes vicious, debate. The loudest voices on one edge of the de...

The confusion/non-consequential thinking explanation proposed by Newstead, Girotto, and Legrenzi (1995) for poor performance on Wason's THOG problem (a hypothetico-deductive reasoning task) was examined in three experiments with 300 participants. In general, as the cognitive complexity of the problem and the possibility of non-consequential thinking were reduced, correct performance increased. Significant but weak facilitation (33-40% correct) was found in Experiment 1 for THOG classification instructions that did not include the indeterminate response option. Substantial facilitation (up to 75% correct) was obtained (...) in Experiment 2 with O'Brien et al.'s (1990) one-other-THOG classification instruction. In Experiment 3, a revised version of O'Brien et al.'s pre-test problem format also led to substantial facilitation, even with the use of the standard three-choice THOG classification instruction. These findings are discussed in terms of Newstead et al.'s theoretical proposal and possible attentional factors. (shrink)

Nurses’ bodywork: is there a body of work? The work that many nurses do involves the use of their own body as one of the tools of their occupation. Being a nurse, in many cases, means controlled, purposeful use of her or his own body oriented to the patient. This paper discusses some of the ways in which nurses’ bodies and the work that those bodies do are represented in professional and academic research accounts and made relevant in literature. Using (...) instances of bodies and bodily activity mentioned in a variety of literature, the paper discusses three categories of accounts of nursing bodywork: those which are problematised and where the nurse's body is seen as a topic for investigation, and those which are unproblematised either explicitly discussing bodily activity (for example, touch) or implicitly dealing with bodywork (for example, taking blood pressure). Four ways in which nurses’ bodies are made relevant in accounts are proposed: relational, corporate, instrumental and human.The paper discusses the prominence (or not) nurses’ bodies are given in professional and academic accounts, as a contribution to preliminary work of generating a topic for investigation and concludes with some suggestions as to how this investigative project might be taken forward, focusing primarily on an examination of methodic practices, or how bodywork is brought off and executed as a skilled but taken‐for‐granted activity. (shrink)

Two contrasting theories-actor-network theory and nondecision making-are separately applied to the same case study, namely, technologies for automatically identifying road vehicles. By this process, the strengths and weaknesses of each approach are highlighted: The actor-network approach is useful for understanding local processes but lacks tools for easily illuminating patterns across countries; by contrast, the concept of nondecision making is useful for explaining the general lack of implementation of technology for automatic vehicle identification but not for explaining variations between developments in (...) different countries. This study highlights the importance of attempting to compare theories by using the same case study. (shrink)

This paper discusses a study examining how mentors in nurse education make professional judgments about the clinical competence of their pre‐registration nursing students. Interviews were undertaken with nine UK students and 15 mentors, using critical incidents in practice settings as a focus. The study was undertaken for the English National Practice‐Based Professional Learning Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. This paper reports on the conversation analytic thread of the work. The mentor role with pre‐registration nursing students is not only (...) supportive but involves formal assessment. Central to the relationship is communication. In professional education, communication is seen as a skill to be applied and assessed in practice settings but is also the medium mentors and mentees use to talk about the relationship. Analysis of excerpts of conversation in the interviews shows that episodes of communication are used as topics of conversation to establish professional identity. It also reveals that judgments about the extent of professional capacity of both students and mentors are grounded in everyday behaviours (for example, enthusiasm, indifference and confidence) as well as professional competence. In addition to focusing on clinical issues, mentors can and do use mundane communication as a resource for judgments about competence. (shrink)

There is a growing trend in Australia to require lawyers to certify reasonable prospects of success for the cases they bring and defend. New South Wales has led the way with the Legal Profession Act 2004 (NSW) Pt 3.2 Division 10 requiring legal practitioners to certify reasonable prospects of success in all claims for damages. The requirement places a significant onus on lawyers to make a judgment about the merits of a case before it is begun, yet the common law (...) has long provided mechanisms to ensure that cases without prospects of success do not go to trial. This article considers Australian legislative provisions requiring lawyers to certify reasonable prospects of success of cases. It examines the application of the NSW legislation by the courts highlighting the difficulties of interpretation of what constitute 'reasonable prospects of success' and the application of the legislation in the context of the dynamic litigation process. It is argued that these legislated obligations on lawyers will have a detrimental effect on access to justice by denying parties, in particular plaintiffs, the opportunity to have their cases properly and fully determined in the courts. This article examines common law mechanisms for dissuading cases without prospects and argues that the general law is an effective system for ensuring that cases without prospects of success are not maintained. The Australian experience is instructive for consideration of optimal reform packages for the administration of justice and to evaluate the role of any litigation lawyer within the judicial and court process. (shrink)

This paper endeavours to move Axel Honneth's recognition-theoretic reconstruction of psychoanalysis beyond its existing focus on the perspective of Winnicott. To this end, it places Honneth into conversation with several non-Winnicottian approaches to the phenomena of insecure attachment and narcissistic vulnerability: the attachment theory of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, the self psychological perspective of Heinz Kohut, and a more recent intersubjectivist psychoanalytic paradigm set forth by Robert Stolorow, George Atwood, Bernard Brandchaft, and Donna Orange. Similar to Honneth, these authors (...) seek to lay bare the maladaptive genetic circumstances under which the psyche becomes alienated from its capacity for self-realization and its ability to engage in healthful intersubjective endeavours. However, with respect to our primary affective relationships, their accounts of pathogenesis depart from Honneth's, focusing not just on overt physical abuse and negligence, but also on other, seemingly more mund.. (shrink)

This paper examines the extent to which parents have absorbed New Right ideas about education and acted accordingly. What emerges is that their commitment to the rhetoric of school choice is strong. However, concepts such as the market and competition are viewed less favourably. An important theme here is the avoidance by parents of any collective agenda in discussing education policy, a factor that may thwart those who attempt to predict their responses to government policy for schools.

En rapport with Jürgen Habermas, this paper argues for an environmental ethics that formalistically links the “good-for-nature” to the communicatively conceived “good-for-humanity.” This orientation guards against the possibility of humanity’s “knowledge-constitutive interest” in the instrumentalization of the environment being pressed forth as a project of limitless domination and mastery. Such an ethics is nonetheless well supplemented with Axel Honneth’s idea of an “indirect” recognitional attitude toward the world of objects, which accommodates the impulse of “care” for nature without succumbing to (...) the aporias of a naturalistic ethic. The essay contends that the categorical resources needed to avert the slide toward naturalism are dissolved in the antifoundationalist “critiques of nature” advanced by Steven Vogel and Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

This article describes key paradigms employed to assess deception and reviews the main neuroscience-based technologies that have been employed to investigate the neural correlates of deception: electroencephalography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and transcranial direct current stimulation. Any potential use of neuroscience-based methods to detect deception in real-life situations requires successful classification in single subjects. It describes findings on the single subject performance of these methods and addresses the effects of two factors that are problematic for all deception detection methods, the (...) potential use of countermeasures, strategies used by subjects to defeat the deception detection tests, and the potential role of false memories and of incidental encoding. It briefly outlines some of the ethical issues associated with these technologies to detect deceptive behavior. (shrink)

For qualitative researchers seeking the perspectives of people with unusual characteristics or circumstances, compliance with expectations about participant anonymity can be difficult, if not impossible. In the age of internet communications and emerging research methodologies, traditional strategies require ongoing re-examination to ensure cohesion between a project’s ethical framework and its research practice. This paper reflects on the approach to informed consent used in a study with parent carers whose children had high-level support needs. A two-step process of written consent was (...) developed in response to concerns about the possible re-identification of these parents as a result of their highly individual circumstances. This approach acknowledged the potential for identification, and maximised participants’ agency in choosing the level of risk that they were comfortable to accommodate. The paper discusses the researcher’s and participants’ responses to the adapted consent process and recommends that researchers and ethics review committees remain open to the development of collaborative and innovative approaches that are also culturally and contextually relevant, to enable people to contribute perspectives that might otherwise be silenced by the very ethical frameworks that purport to protect their interests. (shrink)

In recent years there has been an increasing critique of the philosophically based reasoning in bioethics which is known as principlism. This article seeks to make a postmodern contribution to this emerging debate by using notions of power and discourse to highlight the limits and superficiality of this , rationalistic mode of reflection. The focus of the discussion will be on the principle of autonomy. Recent doctoral research on a hospice organization (Karuna Hospice Service) will be used to contextualize the (...) debate to end-of life ethical dilemmas. The conclusion will be reached that the discursive richness of this organization's notion of autonomy or choice, which incorporates a holistic respect for the individual and the active creation of alternatives, can provide important insights to our understanding of autonomy in bioethics. The concern is raised that if autonomy is reified as a principle outside of the context of discourse, it may only complement the hegemonic power of biomedicine. (shrink)