We sometimes blame persons, and we sometimes give them credit for the emotions they feel. We could, for example, speak of feeling hatred, resentment or envy as “reprehensible” in suitable circumstances, or say “He's to blame for feeling that way.” We could speak of feeling sympathy, affection or indignation as “commendable” in suitable circumstances, or say “He deserves credit for feeling that way.” And it is not just that we are assessing such emotion as somehow good or bad — in (...) addition we may reproach or censure a person for the emotions he feels, or we may regard it as a credit to him that he feels as he does. In short, we apportion or impute responsibility to persons sometimes for the emotions they feel, and one important indication of this fact is in the sorts of judgments we can make about emotions. (shrink)

Arendt understands morality not in terms of maxims or moral principles, neither in their abstract nor in their relativistic acceptation. There is an original question raised by Arendt that has not been taken seriously enough. This question has powerful moral implications, for it directs us to choose our -company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past-. This book is concerned with an ethics based on the visibility of our words and deeds, in (...) which, apart our intentions, appearance is ethically relevant. In the ethics of personal responsibility stands a fundamental dimension of choice able to bridge the self and the world, consciousness and experience. This ethics takes into account three levels of responsibility: responsibility towards ourselves, or how we make our presence in the world; responsibility to judge; and responsibility to the world through the consistency of our actions.". (shrink)

Nichols and Bruno claim that the folk judge that psychological continuity is necessary for personal identity. In this article, we evaluate this claim. First, we argue that it is likely that in thinking about hypothetical cases of transformations, the folk do not use a unitary concept of personal identity, but instead rely on different concepts of ‘person’, ‘identity’, and ‘individual’. Identity can be ascribed even when post-transformation individuals are no longer categorized as persons. Second, we provide new empirical evidence (...) suggesting that the folk do not consider psychological continuity to be necessary for an individual to be categorized as a person or for ascribing identity over time and through transformations. In this, we assume, along with Nichols and Bruno, that folk judgments about identity can be read off the use of proper names. Furthermore, we raise some doubts about the ability of current experimental designs to adequately distinguish between qualitative and numerical identity jud.. (shrink)

Some have argued that advances in the science of human decision-making, particularly research on automaticity and unconscious priming, would ultimately thwart our commonsense understanding of free will and moral responsibility. Do people interpret this research as a threat to their self-understanding as free and responsible agents? We approached this question by seeing how feelings of surprise mediate the relationship between personal sense of control and third-personal attributions of free will and responsibility. Across three studies (_N_ = 1,516) we (...) found that people with a greater sense of personal control were more surprised at the results of experiments showing effects of unconscious priming on moral behavior. Surprise differentially mediated the relationship between personal control and attributions of free will and responsibility: people attributed _less_ free will and _more_ responsibility as they were more surprised. This suggests that people exhibit defensive thinking with respect to responsibility, but not free will. (shrink)

I have four responses to make, the first three very brief and the last not much longer.On the face of it, it looks as though in attributing rights to people one is saying something about their moral position. This is so for both option-rights and welfare-rights. On H.L.A. Hart's account of rights to freedom, that is exactly what one is doing. One is asserting that those who have the right have a special kind of justification for limiting the freedom of (...) others. On Professor Brandt's view, it appears that attributing a right to someone is just an oblique way of saying something about the moral position of others, and nothing more. (shrink)

Some have argued that advances in the science of human decision-making, particularly research on automaticity and unconscious priming, would ultimately thwart our commonsense understanding of free will and moral responsibility. Do people interpret this research as a threat to their self-understanding as free and responsible agents? We approached this question by seeing how feelings of surprise mediate the relationship between personal sense of control and third-personal attributions of free will and responsibility. Across three studies (N = 1,516) we (...) found that people with a greater sense of personal control were more surprised at the results of experiments showing effects of unconscious priming on moral behavior. Surprise differentially mediated the relationship between personal control and attributions of free will and responsibility: people attributed less free will and more responsibility as they were more surprised. This suggests that people exhibit defensive thinking with respect to responsibility, but not free will. (shrink)

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is being used to argue for wider recognition of the legal capacity of people with mental disabilities. This raises a question about the implications of the Convention for attributions of criminal responsibility. The present paper works towards an answer by analysing the relationship between legal capacity in relation to personal decisions and criminal acts. Its central argument is that because moral and political considerations play an essential role (...) in setting the relevant standards, legal capacity in the context of personal decisions and criminal acts should not be thought of as two sides of the same coin. The implications of particular moral or political norms are likely to be different in these two legal contexts, and this may justify asymmetries in the relevant standards for legal capacity. However, the analysis highlights a fundamental question about how much weight moral or political considerations should be given in setting these standards, and this is used to frame a challenge to those calling for significantly wider recognition of the legal capacity of people with mental disabilities on the basis of the Convention. (shrink)

Epigenetic markers could potentially be used for risk assessment in risk-stratified population-based cancer screening programmes. Whereas current screening programmes generally aim to detect existing cancer, epigenetic markers could be used to provide risk estimates for not-yet-existing cancers. Epigenetic risk-predictive tests may thus allow for new opportunities for risk assessment for developing cancer in the future. Since epigenetic changes are presumed to be modifiable, preventive measures, such as lifestyle modification, could be used to reduce the risk of cancer. Moreover, epigenetic markers (...) might be used to monitor the response to risk-reducing interventions. In this article, we address ethical concerns related to personal responsibility raised by epigenetic risk-predictive tests in cancer population screening. Will individuals increasingly be held responsible for their health, that is, will they be held accountable for bad health outcomes? Will they be blamed or subject to moral sanctions? We will illustrate these ethical concerns by means of a Europe-wide research programme that develops an epigenetic risk-predictive test for female cancers. Subsequently, we investigate when we can hold someone responsible for her actions. We argue that the standard conception of personal responsibility does not provide an appropriate framework to address these concerns. A different, prospective account of responsibility meets part of our concerns, that is, concerns about inequality of opportunities, but does not meet all our concerns about personal responsibility. We argue that even if someone is responsible on grounds of a negative and/or prospective account of responsibility, there may be moral and practical reasons to abstain from moral sanctions. (shrink)

Reflections about the role of human choice in determining personal health occur in the writings of practitioners and laymen throughout history. The Greek and Roman writers emphasized the effect of life's activities. During the Middle Ages and Renaisance, disease continued to be seen as a consequence of disorder of the bodily humors, which were under the individual's control. The rise of the paternalistic national regimes in Europe produced the view that society had the responsibility to maintain health. Jacksonian egalitarianism (...) led to a reaction against the agressive therapies of established professional experts, a view furthered by the Thomsonian belief that people should wrest control of their health away from orthodox physicians. Among the twentieth century reactions was the movement to urge people to have doctors evaluate laypersons' health. By the 1970s a movement emerged emphasizing again personal responsibility, which, in turn, produced a concern that this was merely "victim-blaming". Views on the role of lay people in determining personal health are heavily influenced by prevailing social, political, and moral climates. Keywords: "responsibility for health: social, personal, or professional?", "causes of illness", "self-reliant health care", historical influences, responsibility for health, "victim-blaming" CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This paper begins with a simple illustration of the choice between individual and population strategies in population health policy. It describes the traditional approach on which the choice is to be made on the relative merits of the two strategies in each case. It continues by identifying two factors—our knowledge of the consequences of the epidemiological transition and the prevalence of responsibility-sensitive theories of distributive justice—that may distort our moral intuitions when we deliberate about the choice of appropriate risk-management (...) strategies in population health. It argues that the confluence of these two factors may lead us to place too much emphasis on personal responsibility in health policy. (shrink)

From the standpoint of the school settings, sport participation constitutes a key strategy concerning the manifestation of positive behaviors that result from the development of personal and social responsibility. Based on the TPSR model, the goal of this study was to evaluate the effects of an intervention geared toward teaching life skills through sport to youngsters who had been committed. The participants were evaluated before and after the intervention. After the initial evaluation, they were randomly assigned to the experimental (...) and control groups. The experimental group took part in the community football program, while the control group attended physical education classes not based on the TPSR model. The experimental model consisted of 3 weekly sessions over the course of 6 weeks, which totaled 18 sessions. This investigation supplied empirical evidence concerning the potential of community sport programs in the teaching and development of life skills deemed necessary for an adequate reintegration of such at-risk youngsters. The model was shown to be valid both in stimulating changes of attitudes and in promoting the adherence to socially positive behaviors. The effectiveness of the model, as well as its unique approach, make its application attractive to both the youngsters and the professionals. This program facilitates the training of youngsters to act, in the sense of promoting both their autonomy and the acquisition of a system of ethics and moral values within a culture of responsibility for how decisions affect the individual and the community. Finally, this intervention generated empirical support in favor of the argument that sport constitutes a unique opportunity within the educational process to establish values, beliefs, attitudes, and practical habits pertaining relationships and cooperation that generate social responsibility in individuals. (shrink)

According to the ‘starting-gate’ interpretation of equality of opportunity, individuals who enjoy equal starts can legitimately become unequal to the extent that their differences derive from choices for which they can be held responsible. There can be no coercive transfers of resources in favour of individuals who disregarded their own futures, and no limits on the right of an individual to distribute resources intrapersonally. This paper assesses two ways in which advocates of equality of opportunity might depart from the starting-gate (...) interpretation. The first involves limiting the degree to which people are liable to pay the costs of their past choices. The second involves limiting their initial opportunities so as to prevent certain risky or apparently short-sighted choices. The paper compares these alternatives in terms of their compatibility with a particular conception of persons as morally equal and temporally extended. It constructs this conception by combining reductionist premises about personal identity with the premise that our status as equals is based on the fundamental requirement of opacity respect. Two conclusions about equality of opportunity are shown to follow from this conception of persons as morally equal and temporally extended: the first is that an individual’s liability to pay the costs of her past choices does not diminish over time; the second is that the individual’s initial scope of choice, in bringing about intrapersonal distributions between her current and future selves, can nevertheless be permissibly limited. The two conclusions are consistent, and the second allows for departures from starting-gate equality of opportunity. (shrink)

The debate on responsibility for health takes place within political philosophy and in policy setting. It is increasingly relevant in the context of rationing scarce resources as a substantial, and growing, proportion of diseases in high-income countries is attributable to lifestyle. Until now, empirical studies of medical professionals' attitudes towards personal responsibility for health as a component of prioritisation have been lacking. This paper explores to what extent Norwegian physicians find personal responsibility for health relevant in prioritisation (...) and what type of risk behaviour they consider relevant in such decisions. The proportion who agree that it should count varies from 17.1% to 26.9%. Higher age and being male is positively correlated with acceptance. The doctors are more willing to consider substance use in priority setting decisions than choices on food and exercise. The findings reveal that a sizeable proportion have beliefs that conflict with the norms stated in the Norwegian Patient Act. It may be possible that the implementation of legal regulations can be hindered by the opposing attitudes among doctors. A further debate on the role personal responsibility should play in priority setting seems warranted. However, given the deep controversies about the concept of health responsibility and its application, it would be wise to proceed with caution.Design Nationally representative cross-sectional study. Setting Panel-data. Participants 1072 respondents, response rate 65%. (shrink)

Moral responsibility seems to presuppose personal identity. However, there are problems with this view, raised by Derek Parfit’s arguments for the view that personal identity isn’t what matters for our practical concerns. While Parfit discusses moral responsibility only in passing, the problems that arise for the connection between moral responsibility and personal identity have recently been sharpened by David Shoemaker. This paper defends the claim that moral responsibility presupposes personal identity against these problems. It argues, first, (...) that only reductionist views about personal identity have problems with the connection between responsibility and identity, which suggests that personal identity is a non-reductionist concept. Second, it argues that while non-reductionism is problematic, there is a novel view—non-representationalism about personal identity, according to which we account for personal identity in terms of a distinctive non-representational function—that is equally well-positioned to rescue the connection as non-reductionism, without suffering from non-reductionism’s problems. (shrink)

The article focuses on the impact of the concept of self-care on persons who are understood as incapable of self-care due to their physical and/or mental ‘incapacity’. The article challenges the idea of this health care concept as empowerment and highlights the difficulties for persons who do not fit into this concept. To exemplify this, the self-care concept is discussed with regard to persons with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In the case of persons with AD, self-care is interpreted in many different (...) ways—depending on the point of view, for instance as an affected person or a carer. To prevent a marginalisation of the growing group of elderly persons with dementia, the article argues that concepts such as those of personhood, wellbeing, autonomy, rationality and normality have to be re-thought with regard to an increasingly ageing population. Taking into account that AD as a socio-medical construct has to be understood in the context of power relations, the article focuses on the mutual influence between the concepts of self-care and of AD and its possible impact on governing dementia and AD in particular. Michel Foucault’s considerations on ‘technologies of the self’ provide the basis for the discussion of the self-care concept within existing societal power relations. (shrink)

This paper investigates, from a philosophical perspective, whether high functioning autists are legally responsible for the crimes they may commit. We do this from the perspective of the Croatian legal system. According to Croatian Criminal Law, but also criminal laws adopted in many other countries, the legal responsibility of the person is undermined due to insanity when two conditions are satisfied. The first may be called the incapacity requirement. It states that a person, when committing the crime, (...) suffers cognitive or volitional incapacities or limited capacities that are relevant for exculpation. The second, we may call the mental disorder requirement, which states that these exculpatory incapacities are due to the presence of a mental disorder. In this paper we focus on the incapacity requirement. The review of the studies on executive functions deficits associated with high-functioning autism suggests that many autists should not be held categorically responsible for the crimes they may commit. Nonetheless, we argue that these impairments in executive functions generally do not provide an unqualified excuse. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Idea of Personality Not since the French Revolution have the masses of men had such a passionate trust in the power of ideas as they have today. Such ideas as society, state, person, are no longer the exclusive concern of the few favored experts in philosophy and political theory. Such other ideas as authority, responsibility, conscience, right, and freedom, have become more than the mere blunted foils of friendly, academic discussion. This democratization of ideas has (...) been, on the whole, a healthy stimulant. No one who recalls the riotous confusion of thought in the nineteenth century will regret a situation that seems to promise a period of redefinition. One does not have to be an obscurantist to regret the uncontrolled and, often uncritical way, in which the findings of physical science were applied in the fields of ethics, religion, politics, sociology, economics, and history. We should have been warned that speculation was moving too rapidly. The careful scientist rarely makes a sweeping and definite conclusion. More rarely still does he make a universal application of deductions, reached in his own sphere of investigation, to all branches of knowledge. If the philosophy of life, built upon the recent biological and sociological premises, has been unsatisfactory, this has been due to an apparent unwillingness to take the time required to distinguish what is of permanent value from what is simply the exaggeration of controversy, in the anxiety to establish a theory. It is conceivable that men should wish, under the impulse of fresh evidence, to re-examine their notions of God, the nature of human progress, society, and free-will; but it is not conceivable that conclusions, reached so rapidly and with so little discrimination between fact and hypothesis, should he always accurate and should really reflect life's problems and complexities. We need to be redeemed from our own overweening confidence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

BackgroundNeuroimaging studies have shown a complex pattern of brain activation during perception of a pleasant odor and during its olfactory imagery. To date, little is known regarding changes in motor cortex excitability during these tasks. Bergamot essential oil is extensively used in perfumes and cosmetics for its pleasantness. Therefore, to further our understanding of the human sense of smell, this study aimed to investigate the effect of perception and imagery of a pleasant odor on motor cortex using Transcranial magnetic stimulation.Materials (...) and MethodsWe examined the primary motor cortex excitability during perception of a pleasant odor or perception of odorless saline. Furthermore, we tested the effect of olfactory imagery of BEO on corticospinal excitability. The increase in motor evoked potential amplitude was correlated with personality dimensions scores, pleasantness, vividness, and general imagery ability.ResultsThe results indicate that the corticospinal excitability changed after both perception and imagery of a pleasant odor. The correlation analysis shows an association with neuroticism personality trait and with general olfactory imagery ability.ConclusionBoth perception of a pleasant odor and its olfactory imagery modulate motor cortex excitability. The enhanced brain activation is affected by specific individual characteristics. Overall, our findings provide physiological evidence for a complex interaction between the olfactory and motor systems. (shrink)

The concept of property is integral to personal and societal development, yet understanding of the cognitive basis of ownership is limited. Objects are the most basic form of property, so our physical interactions with owned objects may elucidate nuanced aspects of ownership. We gave participants a coffee mug to decorate, use and keep. The experimenter also designed a mug of her own. In Experiment 1, participants performed natural lifting actions with each mug. Participants lifted the Experimenter’s mug with greater care, (...) and moved it slightly more towards the Experimenter, while they lifted their own mug more forcefully and drew it closer to their own body. In Experiment 2, participants responded to stimuli presented on the mug handles in a computer-based stimulus–response compatibility task. Overall, participants were faster to respond in trials in which the handles were facing in the same direction as the response location compared to when the handles were facing away. The compatibility effect was abolished, however, for the Experimenter’s mug – as if the action system is blind to the potential for action towards another person’s property. These findings demonstrate that knowledge of the ownership status of objects influences visuomotor processing in subtle and revealing ways. (shrink)

In June 2012, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his plans for a ban on the sale of sugary beverages in containers larger than 16 ounces. Shortly thereafter, the Center for Consumer Freedom took out a full-page ad in the New York Times featuring Bloomberg photo-shopped into a matronly dress with the tag line “New Yorkers need a Mayor, not a Nanny.” On television, the CATO Institute's Michael Cannon declared, “This is the most ridiculous sort of nanny state-ism; [i]t’s (...) none of the mayor's business how much soda people are drinking.” And in newspapers around the country, editorial pages featured headlines such as “Gulp! Yet Another Intrusion of the Nanny State.” Just like that, the public debate about this measure became focused on government overreach, while the public health problem of obesity faded into the background. (shrink)

How are we to understand one person's responsibility to another when one person wrongs another? Within legal and philosophical literature, we can identify a prevailing paradigmatic approach to answering this question. The key distinguishing feature of this paradigmatic approach is the assumption that there is a division between what defines a person's wrongdoing on one hand, and the significance of losses suffered by another person on the other hand. Throughout this thesis, I argue against this (...) approach and the theories that participate in it, including theories presented by Judith Jarvis Thomson, Stephen Perry, Jules Coleman, and Ernest Weinrib. ;As an alternative to theories that take up this paradigmatic approach, I present the duty/right based theory of responsibility. I build this theory of responsibility from the bottom up, starting with the structure and content of the wrong a person is responsible to another for. I argue that the wrong one person does to another is defined in terms of the freedom one person rightfully holds in relation to another. Since duties and rights set out the limits of each person's freedom in relation to the freedom of others, the formal and substantive content of those duties and correlative rights explain not only the nature of the wrong one person does to another, but also what one person must do in relation to another to appropriately address such a wrong. To appropriately address a relational wrong, an actor must give back the measure of the freedom she illicitly takes from another person when she commits a relational wrong against that person. One means of doing this is for the wrongdoer to compensate a person for the illicit harm he suffers as part of a relational wrong. The coherent explanation this theory provides as to the role compensation plays in appropriately addressing a wrong one person does to another explains some of our basic intuitions and practices surrounding the issue of responsibility between persons, including those that concern the extent to which the use of damages in tort law enforces the kind of responsibility in question. (shrink)

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries worldwide have put lockdowns in place to prevent the virus from spreading. Evidence shows that lockdown measures can affect mental health; it is, therefore, important to identify the psychological characteristics making individuals more vulnerable. The present study aimed, first, to identify, through a cluster analysis, the psychological attributes that characterize individuals with similar psychological responses to the COVID-19 home confinement; second, to investigate whether different psychological characteristics, such as personality traits, alexithymia, and resilience, specifically (...) influence anxiety, stress, and depression, depending on the scope of the confinement. We analyzed data from 393 participants who completed an online survey on their experiences during two different phases of the Italian lockdown, characterized by more or less strict measures of confinement. Two clusters were identified which included participants reporting a better (+ER) and worse (−ER) emotional response to the lockdown, respectively. Individuals in the −ER group showed lower emotional stability, resilience, and higher alexithymia. Moreover, even if lifting part of the restrictions decreased psychological distress among all participants, a reduction in perceived stress was observed only among individuals with high resilience. Finally, personality traits, alexithymia, and resilience differently affected depression, anxiety, and stress. Our results suggest that different psychological interventions should be planned depending on the context: mental health professionals should focus on enhancing the individuals’ coping strategies to alleviate stress in emergencies, while long-term intervention aiming at alleviating anxiety and depressive symptoms should focus on alexithymic tendencies and personality constructs. (shrink)

The article argues that, linguistically speaking, there is no uniform class of personal taste predicate. There is an F(un)‐type PPT that takes infinitive complements expressing events. In effect, these PPTs are predicates of events involving participants. There is also a T(asty)‐type that cannot take an infinitive complement and does not enter into the alternation pattern of the F‐type predicates. These predicates express dispositions of objects to generate experiences or responses. Some experiencer/judge is involved in the truth of the respective kinds (...) of claims, but for different reasons, and in neither case is such a role encoded linguistically as an index for the predicate. (shrink)

R. Jay Wallace argues in this book that moral accountability hinges on questions of fairness: When is it fair to hold people morally responsible for what they do? Would it be fair to do so even in a deterministic world? To answer these questions, we need to understand what we are doing when we hold people morally responsible, a stance that Wallace connects with a central class of moral sentiments, those of resentment, indignation, and guilt. To hold someone responsible, he (...) argues, is to be subject to these reactive emotions in one's dealings with that person. Developing this theme with unusual sophistication, he offers a new interpretation of the reactive emotions and traces their role in our practices of blame and moral sanction. With this account in place, Wallace advances a powerful and sustained argument against the common view that accountability requires freedom of will. Instead, he maintains, the fairness of holding people responsible depends on their rational competence: the power to grasp moral reasons and to control their behavior accordingly. He shows how these forms of rational competence are compatible with determinism. At the same time, giving serious consideration to incompatibilist concerns, Wallace develops a compelling diagnosis of the common assumption that freedom is necessary for responsibility. Rigorously argued, eminently readable, this book touches on issues of broad concern to philosophers, legal theorists, political scientists, and anyone with an interest in the nature and limits of responsibility. (shrink)

The objective of the present work is to make a comparison between Mill's and Rawls' conceptions of person. Through this comparison, the convergences and divergences between these views will be analyzed. The first step is to identify the principles of Millian moral psychology, which support his doctrine. He calls these aspects the general laws of the human emotional constitution: [i] taxonomy of pleasures; [ii] human dignity; [iii] sociability; [iv] individuality; [v] Aristotelian principle. In the second step I analyze what (...) Rawls calls the political conception of the person. In this view, citizens are conceived as individuals who consider themselves free in three aspects, which are as follows: [i] they conceive of themselves and others as individuals who have a good conception, [ii] they recognize the right to make demands, [iii] and are able to take responsibility for their goals. Finally, in the third part I make a comparison between the two conceptions. It is noted that many of these aspects are interrelated, the conception of person and moral psychology seems to play the role of an anchor in the theoretical structure of both. The two philosophers anchor their principles of justice in moral psychology. (shrink)

The hospital has legal liability. Does it also have moral responsibility? Is it a moral agent, and if so in what sense? There are two issues involved, one conceptual and the other normative. The conceptual issue is whether a hospital can be morally responsible. If seen not only as a physical facility but as a formal organization, it can be said to act rationally, choose between alternatives, and affect human beings. It thus satisfies die criteria for moral responsibility, (...) even though it is not a person. Though moral responsibility can be attributed intelligibly to a hospital, such responsibility can be assumed only by those within it who act for it. Such responsibility is agent responsibility and may be shared in a number of ways. Hospital responsibilities can be separated from the professional moral responsibility and the personal moral responsibility held by doctors, nurses, and others within a hospital. Assuming these three types of responsibility makes possible conflicts of responsibility for those who hold them. Normatively, the moral responsibility of the hospital is appropriately limited by its purpose and is primarily administrative. It has designatable moral responsibilities to its patients, doctors and nurses, and the public. These can be distinguished from the responsibilities of doctors and nurses to the public. The responsibility of a doctor on the hospital staff is different from the responsibility of a doctor who simply practices in the hospital; that of a staff nurse from that of a private nurse. The difference is in large part a function of the one sharing die responsibility of the hospital and the other not. An analysis of a hospital's moral responsibilities suggests structures appropriate to a hospital that wishes to meet its moral responsibilities. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This article reflects upon what can go wrong when we merge causal responsibility for past harms with a duty-based responsibility for remedying these harms and/or preventing them in the future.

The article sets out aspects of locke's theory of personal identity which were seen by contemporaries to be not only fallacious but also to conflict with christian doctrine regarding the soul. A modified theory is then educed, From berkeley, Butler, William law and other divines, Which avoids these fallacies, Is epistemologically more rigorous and arguably expressed christian doctrine more accurately. This is seen as a forerunner of some central concerns of romantic theology.

Howard Minkoff, Raaga Unmesha Vullikanti and Mary Faith Marshall argue that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization not only undermines the right to abortion b...

In this paper we discuss a phenomenon we call perspectival plurality, which has gone largely unnoticed in the current debate between relativism and contextualism about predicates of personal taste. According to perspectival plurality, the truth value of a sentence containing more than one PPT may depend on more than one perspective. Prima facie, the phenomenon engenders a problem for relativism and can be shaped into an argument in favor of contextualism. We explore the consequences of perspectival plurality in depth and (...) assess several possible responses on behalf of advocates of relativism. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to implement the teaching personal and social responsibility model in a competitive context analyzing the differences between the intervention and the control group on personal and social responsibility, prosocial behaviors, and self-efficacy in youth soccer players. Participants were 34 youth soccer players between the ages of 14 and 16 years old divided into two different soccer teams of 17 members, corresponding to the control and intervention groups. The implementation of the TPSR model (...) took place during 9 months, including initial and ongoing coach training, program implementation, and a series of expert-led seminars for athletes. The questionnaires used to collect data were the Personal and Social Responsibility Questionnaire, Prosocial Behavior Scale, and two Children’s Self-efficacy Scales. Results indicated that the TPSR intervention group obtained an increase in post-test levels of personal and social responsibility, prosocial behavior, and self-efficacy due to the application of the TPSR model compared with control group that used a conventional sport teaching methodology. The conclusion is that the TPSR model has the potential to be adapted and implemented with flexibility in youth sport competition contexts in order to improve personal and social responsibility, prosocial behavior, and self-efficacy. (shrink)

Upshot: I offer responses to the commentaries on my target article in five short sections. The first section, about the plurality of lived worlds, concerns issues of quite general interest to readers of this journal. The second section presents some reasons for rejecting “enabling” as well as “constitutive” representational approaches to understanding the mind. In the remaining three sections, I clarify aspects of sensorimotor direct realism relating to the self, qualia, counterfactuals, and the notion of “mastery.”.

The major concern of the problem of personal identity gravitates around the question of whether a person’s identity is located in the mind or in the body. Scholars have developed different theories such as survivalist and physicalist criteria among others in response to this question. In this paper, I engage with the theory of sense-phenomenalism as an aspect of the physicalist criterion of personal identity to show how it might legitimize racism and colour-branding. Sense-phenomenalism is a body-only model of (...) personal identity that holds that an individual’s identity is determined by the physical features sensually perceptible by other humans in the society. I argue that sense-phenomenalism by reposing a person’s identity on his/her bodily traits might foster social discrimination, deepen the dichotomy between the self and the other and enhance the fabrication of justifications for the denial of individual’s rights. (shrink)

Researchers have documented negative physical and emotional consequences for both family caregivers of persons with cancer as well as caregivers of persons with a neurologic disorder. However, there is a unique subset of caregivers who must provide care for someone who may suffer from both a short, terminal trajectory of disease, as well as neurological and neuropsychiatric sequelae — the caregiver of a person with a primary malignant brain tumor. The purpose of this article was to describe a conceptual (...) framework for providing care for a person with a primary malignant brain tumor. The demands of this particular care situation are described, as well as potential resources available to the caregiver to meet those demands. Finally, the stress response that results from the balance between care demands and caregiver resources is illustrated. Development of a conceptual framework for this caregiving population is the first step in assisting nurses to identify factors that place caregivers of persons with a primary malignant brain tumor at risk for negative consequences, and to design interventions to improve caregiver health. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 189-192 [Access article in PDF] The Responsibility of the Psychopathic Offender:Commentary on Ciocchetti Piers Benn Christopher Ciocchetti has valuable things to say in his article. He takes as his starting point some common ground between his views and my own, especially about the importance of Strawsonian participant reactive attitudes to our understanding of psychopathy. But he proceeds to claim that the distinguishing (...) feature of psychopaths is not their lack of such attitudes but their inability to understand how relationships are affected by their behavior—and indeed their inability, in some sense, to understand interpersonal relationships at all. He also takes me to task for claiming that the participant reactive attitudes (PRAs)—presumably he includes things like resentment, indignation, gratitude, and so on—are essentially communicative. For him, this is too strong a claim, because we can imagine cases when such attitudes are expressed, but without any communicative purpose.On the latter point, I concede that people often do express PRAs even though they know such expression will have no effect on those whose behavior or attitudes gave rise to them. Different things can explain this lack of effect. For example, imagine a normally responsive person who obstinately fails to see that a certain judgment applies to him or her in a particular case. Take a woman who repeatedly expresses frustration and anger toward her husband for failing to do any domestic chores, but without having the slightest effect on him. Eventually her expressions of anger serve more as an emotional release than as an attempt to get him to change. As in Ciocchetti's example of Mary's reaction to her calls not being returned, she gives up in the end, expressing anger but without any hope of getting through to the other person.But there is another possible explanation for her anger: suppose the husband's failure to contribute to the housework does not arise from his inability to respond to moral claims upon him, but because he thinks he is already doing his duty by being the sole wage earner, and is quite intransigent about this. In that case, the woman might still see him, in general, as a proper object of her PRAs. She sees his fault as local rather than general; a failure, or perhaps even an inability, to think properly about this particular issue rather than about moral demands in general. She might regard her angry outbursts as justified, not because they will have any effect on him now, [End Page 189] but because they are a proper participant response to some earlier failure, which he was then able to do something about—maybe he neglected to think properly about fairness when forming his moral outlook.Compare this case, though, with someone who just does not understand the nature of relationships and the obligations they impose. This is the sort of case Ciocchetti has in mind. Anger is, on his account, understandable, not because it is meant to communicate anything, but because it is "an expression with no further aim at all" (2003, p. 178). On this point, I agree that people sometimes do express anger (or other emotions) without trying to induce a response in someone. At the same time, there is a significant difference between times when we do hope to elicit an appropriate participant response like shame, and times when we do not. When we express such attitudes without any hope of a participant response, we miss something that is, if not essential to, at least typical of such expressions. Getting angry with the neighbor's aggressive dog or scrounging cat is understandable, but it is simply not the same kind of thing as getting angry with a normal, rational adult. The typical case, maybe the necessarily typical case, is when we experience or express such emotions toward, or at least concerning, beings capable of PRAs—and, again typically if not always, such beings are capable of understanding when and why the PRAs of others are directed toward them.But the thrust of Ciocchetti's paper lies not... (shrink)

According to indexical contextualism, the perspectival element of taste predicates and epistemic modals is part of the content expressed. According to nonindexicalism, the perspectival element must be conceived as a parameter in the circumstance of evaluation, which engenders “thin” or perspective-neutral semantic contents. Echoing Evans, thin contents have frequently been criticized. It is doubtful whether such coarse-grained quasi-propositions can do any meaningful work as objects of propositional attitudes. In this paper, I assess recent responses by Recanati, Kölbel, Lasersohn and MacFarlane (...) to the “incompleteness worry”. None of them manages to convince. Particular attention is devoted to an argument by John MacFarlane, which states that if perspectives must be part of the content, so must worlds, which would make intuitively contingent propositions necessary. I demonstrate that this attempt to defend thin content views such as nonindexical contextualism and relativism conflates two distinct notions of necessity, and that radical indexicalist accounts of semantics, such as Schaffer’s necessitarianism, are in fact quite plausible. (shrink)

Coping with a relative with a learning disability could be a stressful experience for family members. The present study is aimed at exploring the coping strategies adopted by families in trying to make meaning of their situation. A qualitative study design using focus group discussions was adopted. Ten FGD sessions were held with family members of persons with a learning disability. Findings revealed patterns of family coping to include problem-focused, emotion-focused, and spiritual/religious-focused. Also, coping responses to a learning disability varied (...) based on the level of information available to families about the condition of their relative. In some cases, interspousal relationship was strained due to stress. It was recommended that families of persons with a learning disability need social support and professional help from social workers to facilitate the adoption of more positive-oriented coping strategies by family members. (shrink)

It is generally accepted that we need more research into concussions and other injuries with potential long-term effects in sport because such research underpins effective, evidence-based prevention, management, support, and treatment. This paper provides an analysis of the obligations of sports federations to support and facilitate such research, as well as an analysis of the role active participants in the sport should have in the research process. The paper focuses on concussion and concussion research, though very similar arguments apply to (...) other common sports injuries with potential long-term effects. The paper argues that sports federations have a moral obligation and a prudential interest in initiating, facilitating, and funding concussion research. This follows from their duty of care towards active participants and from considerations of reciprocity. The ability to discharge these research obligations depends on the resources available to a particular federation, but those who can discharge them should do so. The paper further argues that athletes and other active participants in sport should be involved in all aspects of the concussion research process from conception to design, i.e. that Active Participant Involvement and Engagement (APIE) should be a non-negotiable element of concussion research projects. This is supported by instrumental reasons, but also by philosophical argument based on standpoint epistemology and on ethical arguments related to the interests of active participants. Standpoint epistemology is the epistemological position that the knowledge a person has and can have depends on that person’s standpoint in the world. Keywords: Concussion, funding, participant involvement, sport, sport association, sport federation. (shrink)

I argue for two major claims in this paper. First, I argue that the linguistic evidence best supports a certain form of contextualism about predicates of personal taste (PPTs) like ?fun? and ?tasty?. In particular, I argue that these adjectives are both individual-level predicates (ILPs) and anaphoric implicit argument taking predicates (IATPs). As ILPs, these naturally form generics. As anaphoric IATPs, PPTs show the same dependencies on context and distributional behavior as more familiar anaphoric IATPs, for example, ?local? and ?apply?. (...) Moreover, they are subject to important binding-related phenomena, for example, various kinds of anaphora, binding arguments, and strict-sloppy ambiguities. The latter are particularly problematic for relativism, contextualism's major competitor. I argue that relativism cannot account for these binding facts in a non-ad hoc manner. Second, I argue that disagreement is a predictable feature of dialogues involving PPTs in conjunction with the contextualist semantics defended. Appealing to ?off the shelf? analyses of genericity, I show how disagreement arises in just the cases we would expect, licensing just the kinds of responses we would expect. They also suggest promising explanations, unavailable to relativists, of various otherwise puzzling features of disagreements involving PPTs. (shrink)