Twenty distinguished philosophers and social theorists have contributed original papers to this stimulating investigation into the nature of the economically just society. Collectively, and in a remarkably coherent fashion, these papers set out the problems of contemporary social theory within the context of the distributive justice vs. property rights debate initiated by the works of John Rawls and Robert Nozick.

Bioethicists function in an environment in which their peers - healthcare executives, lawyers, nurses, physicians - assert the integrity of their fields through codes of professional ethics. Is it time for bioethics to assert its integrity by developing a code of ethics? Answering in the affirmative, this paper lays out a case by reviewing the historical nature and function of professional codes of ethics. Arguing that professional codes are aggregative enterprises growing in response to a field's historical experiences, it asserts (...) that bioethics now needs to assert its integrity and independence and has already developed a body of formal statements that could be aggregated to create a comprehensive code of ethics for bioethics. A Draft Model Aggregated Code of Ethics for Bioethicists is offered in the hope that analysis and criticism of this draft code will promote further discussion of the nature and content of a code of ethics for bioethicists. (shrink)

The project of this book is to establish that Aristotle, contrary to what some have thought, did have a theory of distinctively "moral" responsibility, and one that is consistent with determinism. It is stipulated early on that having a theory of moral responsibility is a matter of first identifying the proper objects of peculiarly moral evaluation and thus specifying the range of responsible agents, and then identifying the actions for which those responsible agents are responsible. Aristotle’s account of moral character (...) is supposed to do the former. The latter is accomplished with his account of voluntariness. I will begin with that. (shrink)

Introduction -- The classical theories -- Emile Durkheim -- Talcott Parsons and structural functionalism -- Karl Marx and marxism -- Max Weber -- The successors -- Norbert Elias -- Critical theory, the Frankfurt school and Jurgen Habermas -- Herbert Blumer and symbolic interactionism -- Michel Foucault -- Pierre Bourdieu -- The present -- The latest modern age -- Modernisation theory -- Conclusions.

It is always appropriate to ask whether an expedient foreign policy is morally justifiable, just as it is always appropriate to ask whether a morally defensible policy is consistent with the national interest. The ongoing dialogue between morality and realpolitik gives much of foreign policy debate its characteristic bite. In this collection of essays, a distinguished group of philosophers, political theorists, and lawyers- including Russell Hardin and Marshall Cohen-explore these contrasting themes. In essays that are at once insightful and accessible, (...) noted political thinkers examine the tension of the conflicting demands of morality and national self-interest in the context of the foundations of international order, the possession and use of nuclear weapons, recourse to war, and the prospects for peace. A final postscript addresses the question of the responsibility of intellectuals in the national foreign policy debate. This book will appeal to scholars and students in any discipline dealing with international affairs as well as to lay readers who wish to explore the implications of taking morality and reason seriously in foreign policy. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

Background In Belgium, termination of pregnancy after the first trimester is exclusively allowed on medical grounds. When faced with fetal or maternal health complications during pregnancy, patients typically turn to obstetricians for guidance on the diagnosis, prognosis, and available options. Patients’ decisions and their actual access to termination of pregnancy can be profoundly influenced by the quality of this counselling and the willingness of professionals to present termination as an acceptable option. This paper aims to explore the factors influencing obstetricians’ (...) acceptance of TOP requests after the first trimester of pregnancy. We subsequently analyze these acceptance dynamics from a multidisciplinary angle, incorporating ethical perspectives and a socio-legal exploration into how the interviewed health professionals experience, interpret, and apply the law. Methods We conducted an interview study with 23 hospital obstetricians who had prior experience with termination of pregnancy decision-making beyond the first trimester in Flanders, Belgium. Interviews, on average, lasted 1h30 and followed a semi-structured format guided by a topic guide. The transcripts were coded with NVivo software and subsequently thematically analyzed by a multidisciplinary research team to provide a comprehensive understanding of obstetricians’ acceptance of termination of pregnancy after the first trimester. Results Obstetricians’ acceptance of termination of pregnancy after the first trimester mainly depends on the presence of compelling clinical factors. Secondary factors, including patient/couple preferences, institutional and collegial processes, timing and viability, technical considerations, obstetricians’ ethical and professional values, the wider background of the patient/couple, and perception of alternatives, could sway decisions in the absence of compelling clinical factors. Conclusions Secondary factors help sway obstetricians’ decisions in favor of or against termination of pregnancy after 12 weeks when a request is characterized by inconclusive clinical factors. The multifactorial acceptance dynamics of obstetricians illustrate the limits of a strong emphasis on fetal interest argumentation. Moreover, they exhibit a degree of divergence and complexity absent from the Belgian Abortion Law. The presented typology of factors could stimulate and guide debates on legal reform and the importance that should be attributed to various factors in professional decision-making on termination of pregnancy. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to formulate first-order Peano arithmetic within the resources of relevant logic, and to demonstrate certain properties of the system thus formulated. Striking among these properties are the facts that it is trivial that relevant arithmetic is absolutely consistent, but classical first-order Peano arithmetic is straightforwardly contained in relevant arithmetic. Under, I shall show in particular that 0 = 1 is a non-theorem of relevant arithmetic; this, of course, is exactly the formula whose unprovability was (...) sought in the Hilbert program for proving arithmetic consistent. Under, I shall exhibit the requisite translation, drawing some Goedelian conclusions therefrom. Left open, however, is the critical problem whether Ackermann’s rule γ is admissible for theories of relevant arithmetic. The particular system of relevant Peano arithmetic featured in this paper shall be called R♯. Its logical base shall be the system R of relevant implication, taken in its first-order form RQ. Among other Peano arithmetics we shall consider here in particular the systems C♯, J♯, and RM3♯; these are based respectively on the classical logic C, the intuitionistic logic J, and the Sobocinski-Dunn semi-relevant logic RM3. And another feature of the paper will be the presentation of a system of natural deduction for R♯, along lines valid for first-order relevant theories in general. This formulation of R♯ makes it possible to construct relevantly valid arithmetical deductions in an easy and natural way; it is based on, but is in some respects more convenient than, the natural deduction formulations for relevant logics developed by Anderson and Belnap in Entailment. (shrink)

Although ethics consultation is offered as a clinical service in most hospitals in the United States, few valid and practical tools are available to evaluate, ensure, and improve ethics consultation quality. The quality of ethics consultation is important because poor quality ethics consultation can result in ethically inappropriate outcomes for patients, other stakeholders, or the health care system. To promote accountability for the quality of ethics consultation, we developed the Ethics Consultation Quality Assessment Tool. ECQAT enables raters to assess the (...) quality of ethics consultations based on the written record. Through rigorous development and preliminary testing, we identified key elements of a quality ethics consultation, established scoring criteria, developed training guidelines, and designed a holistic assessment process. This article describes the development of the ECQAT,.. (shrink)

Over the past several decades, medical ethics has gained a solid foothold in medical education and is now a required course in most medical schools. Although the field of medical ethics is by nature eclectic, moral philosophy has played a dominant role in defining both the content of what is taught and the methodology for reasoning about ethical dilemmas. Most educators largely rely on the case‐based method for teaching ethics, grounding the ethical reasoning in an amalgam of theories drawn from (...) moral philosophy, including consequentialism, deontology, and principlism.In this article we hope to make a case for augmenting the focus of education in medical ethics. We propose complementing the traditional approach to medical ethics with a more embedded approach, one that has been described by others as “microethics,” the ethics of everyday clinical practice. (shrink)

In 1978, the authors began a paper, “S,” henceforth [S4S], intended as a philosophical companion piece to the technical solution [SPW] of the Anderson-Belnap P–W problem. [S4S] has gone through a number of drafts, which have been circulated among close friends. Meanwhile other authors have failed to see the point of the semantics which we introduced in [SPW]. It will accordingly be our purpose here to revisit that semantics, while giving our present views on syllogistic matters past, present and future, (...) especially as they relate to not begging the question via such dubious theses as A →’ A. We shall investigate in particular a paraconsistent attitude toward such theses. (shrink)

��This paper investigates how an evolutionary al- gorithm with an indirect encoding exploits the property of phenotypic regularity, an important design principle found in natural organisms and engineered designs. We present the first comprehensive study showing that such phenotypic regularity enables an indirect encoding to outperform direct encoding con- trols as problem regularity increases. Such an ability to produce regular solutions that can exploit the regularity of problems is an important prerequisite if evolutionary algorithms are to scale to high-dimensional real-world (...) problems, which typically contain many regularities, both known and unrecognized. The indirect encoding in this case study is HyperNEAT, which evolves artificial neural networks (ANNs) in a manner inspired by concepts from biological development. We demonstrate that, in contrast to two direct encoding controls, HyperNEAT produces both regular behaviors and regular ANNs, which enables HyperNEAT to significantly outperform the direct encodings as regularity increases in three problem domains. We also show that the types of regularities HyperNEAT produces can be biased, allowing domain knowledge and preferences to be injected into the search. Finally, we examine the downside of a bias toward regularity. Even when a solution is mainly regular, some irregularity may be needed to perfect its functionality. This insight is illustrated by a new algorithm called HybrID that hybridizes indirect and direct encodings, which matched HyperNEAT’s performance on regular problems yet outperformed it on problems with some irregularity. HybrID’s ability to improve upon the performance of HyperNEAT raises the question of whether indirect encodings may ultimately excel not as stand-alone algorithms, but by being hybridized with a further process of refinement, wherein the indirect encoding produces patterns that exploit problem regu-. (shrink)

For all of the emphasis on quality improvement—as well as the acknowledged overlap between assessment of the quality of healthcare services and clinical ethics—the quality of clinical ethics consultation has received scant attention, especially in terms of empirical measurement. Recognizing this need, the second edition of Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation identified four domains of ethics quality: (1) ethicality, (2) stakeholders’ satisfaction, (3) resolution of the presenting conflict/dilemma, and (4) education that translates into knowledge. This study is the (...) first, to our knowledge, to directly measure all of these domains. Here we describe the quality improvement process undertaken at a tertiary care academic medical center, as well as the tools developed to measure the quality of ethics consultation, which include post-consultation satisfaction surveys and weekly case conferences. The information gained through these tools helps to improve not only the process of ethics consultation, but also the measurement and assurance of quality. (shrink)

These two volumes collect papers presented at the first joint meeting of the two principal logic programming conferences, held in August of 1988. The more than fifty contributions cover all aspects of the field, including applications (particularly those that exploit the unique character of logic programming), the role of logic programming in artificial intelligence, deductive databases, relations to other computational paradigms, language issues, methodology, implementations on sequential and parallel architectures, and theory.Logic Programming is included in the Logic Programming series Research (...) Reports and Notes, edited by Ehud Shapiro. (shrink)

This paper offers an elementary proof that formal arithmetic is consistent. The system that will be proved consistent is a first-order theory R♯, based as usual on the Peano postulates and the recursion equations for + and ×. However, the reasoning will apply to any axiomatizable extension of R♯ got by adding classical arithmetical truths. Moreover, it will continue to apply through a large range of variation of the un- derlying logic of R♯, while on a simple and straightforward translation, (...) the classical first-order theory P♯ of Peano arithmetic turns out to be an exact subsystem of R♯. Since the reasoning is elementary, it is formalizable within R♯ itself; i.e., we can actually demonstrate within R♯ (or within P♯, if we care) a statement that, in a natural fashion, asserts the consistency of R♯ itself. The reader is unlikely to have missed the significance of the remarks just made. In plain English, this paper repeals Goedel’s famous second theorem. (That’s the one that asserts that sufficiently strong systems are inadequate to demonstrate their own consistency.) That theorem (or at least the significance usually claimed for it) was a mis- take—a subtle and understandable mistake, perhaps, but a mistake nonetheless. Accordingly, this paper reinstates the formal program which is often taken to have been blasted away by Goedel’s theorems— namely, the Hilbert program of demonstrating, by methods that everybody can recognize as effective and finitary, that intuitive mathematics is reliable. Indeed, the present consistency proof for arithmetic will be recognized as correct by anyone who can count to 3. (So much, indeed, for the claim that the reliability of arithmetic rests on transfinite induction up to ε0, and for the incredible mythology that underlies it.). (shrink)

THIS PAPER ARGUES, AGAINST A. O. LOVEJOY AND WITH R. B.\nPERRY, THAT JAMES' THEORY OF MEANING DOES NOT CONFUSE\nCONSEQUENCES OF BELIEVING AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE\nSTATEMENTS BELIEVED. RATHER, I ARGUE THAT JAMES HOLDS THAT\nTHE MEANING OF A SYNTHETIC STATEMENT IS TO BE FOUND IN ITS\nPERCEPTUAL CONSEQUENCES WHILE CONSEQUENCES OF BELIEVING ARE\nRELEVANT TO 'JUSTIFYING' OVERBELIEFS; THAT IS, TO\nJUSTIFYING MEANINGFUL STATEMENTS FOR WHICH THE EVIDENCE IS\nINSUFFICIENT TO PROVIDE A RATIONAL, NON-PASSIONAL\nJUSTIFICATION. ALTHOUGH THIS THEORY OF MEANING APPEARS\nANTI-METAPHYSICAL, JAMES DOES NOT USE IT TO RULE (...) OUT\nMETAPHYSICS BECAUSE HE BELIEVES, ALONG WITH COMMON SENSE,\nTHAT METAPHYSICAL DOCTRINES ARE MEANINGFUL; THUS, THE\nQUESTION IS WHAT METAPHYSICAL DOCTRINES MEAN AND NOT\nWHETHER THEY ARE MEANINGFUL. ALTHOUGH JAMES IS OFTEN\nMISLEADING IN TALKING ABOUT MEANING, I ARGUE THAT THIS\nINTERPRETATION IS SUPPORTED BY HIS NUMEROUS DISCUSSIONS OF\nMETAPHYSICS. PAUL HENLE'S ATTEMPT TO PROVIDE A FAVORABLE\nINTERPRETATION OF JAMES WITHIN LOVEJOY'S FRAMEWORK, IS ALSO\nSHOWN TO BE INCOHERENT. (shrink)

In 1978, the authors began a paper, “S (for Syllogism),” henceforth [S4S], intended as a philosophical companion piece to the technical solution [SPW] of the Anderson-Belnap P–W problem. [S4S] has gone through a number of drafts, which have been circulated among close friends. Meanwhile other authors have failed to see the point of the semantics which we introduced in [SPW]. It will accordingly be our purpose here to revisit that semantics, while giving our present views on syllogistic matters past, present (...) and future, especially as they relate to not begging the question via such dubious theses as A →’ A. We shall investigate in particular a paraconsistent attitude toward such theses. (shrink)

Bioethics conjures images of dramatic healthcare challenges, yet everyday clinical ethics issues unfold regularly. Without sufficient ethical awareness and a relevant working skillset, clinicians can feel ill-equipped to respond to the ethical dimensions of everyday care. Bioethicists were interviewed to identify the essential skills associated with everyday clinical ethics and to identify educational case scenarios to illustrate everyday clinical ethics. Individual, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of bioethicists. Bioethicists were asked: (1) What are the essential skills required (...) for everyday clinical ethics? And (2) What are potential educational case scenarios to illustrate and teach everyday clinical ethics? Participant interviews were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Twenty-five (25) bioethicists completed interviews (64% female; mean 14.76 years bioethics experience; 80% white). Five categories of general skills and three categories of ethics-specific skills essential for everyday clinical ethics were identified. General skills included: (1) Awareness of Core Values and Self-Reflective Capacity; (2) Perspective-Taking and Empathic Presence; (3) Communication and Relational Skills; (4) Cultural Humility and Respect; and (5) Organizational Understanding and Know-How. Ethics-specific skills included: (1) Ethical Awareness; (2) Ethical Knowledge and Literacy; and (3) Ethical Analysis and Interaction. Collectively, these skills comprise a Toolbox of Everyday Clinical Ethics Skills. Educational case scenarios were identified to promote everyday ethics. Bioethicists identified skills essential to everyday clinical ethics. Educational case scenarios were identified for the purpose of promoting proficiency in this domain. Future research could explore the impact of integrating educational case scenarios on clinicians’ ethical competencies. (shrink)