On 27 February 1998, the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta and the office of the Fulbright binational educational exchanges (US Educational Foundation in India) in Calcutta jointly hosted a seminar on 'The Tradition of Non Violence: The American Experience and the Gandhian' at the Management Centre for Human Values (MCHV). There were two keynote presentations. The one on the American experience was by Michael True, Professor of English Literature at Assumption College, Massachusetts, who was teaching as Fulbright visiting lecturer (...) at Utkal University, Bhubaneswar. The Gandhian case was presented by Profes sor Amlan Datta, economist and writer, also former Vice-Chancellor of Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. The session was chaired by Professor Amitava Bose, Director, Indian Institute of Management. To close the discussions, a summing up was presented by Professor S.K. Chakraborty, Convenor, Management Centre for Human Values. The importance of discussions on the subject of non-violence and the Gandhian alterna tive cannot be overestimated in this year of the 50th anniversary of Indian independence and a nationwide soul-searching over these five decades. The US Educational Foundation in India contributed to the national discussion through this bilateral seminar and its comparative perspective. (shrink)

What does world peace mean? Peace is more than the absence and prevention of war, whether international or civil, yet most of our ways of conceptualizing and measuring peace amount to just that definition. In this essay, as part of the roundtable “World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It),” I argue that any vision of world peace must grapple not only with war but with the continuums of violence and peace emphasized by feminists: running from the home and community (...) to the public spaces of international relations. Breaking free of the constraints of the last century's intellectual boundaries, I suggest that war and peace are not a dichotomy but rather are intimately related. Yet the dearth of feminist perspectives in global debates prevents us from seeing how violence and harm are exacerbated in households and through the global economy under conditions of both “war” and “peace.” To understand the possibilities for world peace, we must understand these varieties of violence and harm that threaten peace. And to sustain peace we must address the harmful gendered identities, ideologies, and social dynamics that support violence in every society. A narrow understanding of peace as merely the absence of organized violence does not engender the kind of nuanced and rich understanding of human history and human relations needed to bring an end to the structural and physical violence that remains pervasive worldwide. (shrink)

This volume addresses the way ethics is taught in American Business Schools. The Editors has assembled a collection of timely essays offering practical experienced-based insights in business education. The authors of these essays address a diversity of topics yet are unanimous in calling for change (even if they occasionally disagree on the best means of accomplishing it). For business faculties seeking to meet this growing and multifaceted challenge within their discipline, this book offers a wealth of useful insights and practical (...) solutions. (shrink)

What are we to make of the New Christian Right’s loss of political influence and the rise of the Tea Party and libertarianism more broadly? Rather than imagine a coalition of resentment as does William E. Connolly, this paper argues that several key religious ideas of protestant fundamentalism have become secularized and now function as a political theology that privileges the personal and marginalizes the public arena. American fundamentalism shares several characteristics with protestant fundamentalism—even as it represents what might be (...) called a migration of the holy. (shrink)

After the re-emergence of the tradition of virtue ethics in the early 1980s Reinhold Niebuhr has often served as a foil for authors who locate themselves in that tradition. However, this exercise has often proved controversial. This collection of essays continues this work, across a wide range of subjects, with the aim of avoiding some of the polemics that have previously accompanied it. The central thesis of this book is that putting the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian realism in (...) dialogue with contemporary virtue theory is a profitable undertaking. An introductory essay argues against locating Niebuhr as a consequentialist and in favour of thinking of his work in terms of a dispositional ethics Contributors take different positions on whether Niebuhr's dispositional ethics should be considered a form of virtue ethics or an alternative to virtue ethics. Several of the articles relate Niebuhr and Christian realism to particular virtues. Throughout there is an appreciation of the ways in which any Niebuhrian approach to dispositional ethics or virtue must be shaped by a sense of tragedy, paradox, or irony. The most moral disposition will be one which includes doubts about its own virtue. This volume allows for a repositioning of Niebuhr in the context of contemporary moral theory as well as a rereading of the tradition of virtue ethics in the light of a distinctly Protestant, Christian realist and paradoxical view of virtue. As a result, it will be of great interest to scholars of Niebuhr and Christian Ethics and scholars working in Moral Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion more generally. (shrink)

La comparaison des portraits à l’huile réalisés par Romaine Brooks dans les années 20 et les photographies de Claude Cahun et sa partenaire Marcel Moore de la même époque rend visible les positions idéologiques conflictuelles que ces women of vision défendirent dans les milieux artistique et politique où les débats sur la femme moderne se sont élaborés.

I argue that metaphysical views of material objects should be understood as 'packages', rather than individual claims, where the other parts of the package include how the theory addresses 'recalcitant data', and that when the packages meet certain general desiderata - which all of the currently competing views *can* meet - there is nothing in the world that could make one of the theories true as opposed to any of the others.

This paper is based on Tarski’s theory of truth. The purpose of this paper is to solve the liar paradox (and its cousins) and keep both of the deductive power of classical logic and the expressive power of the word “true” in natural language. The key of this paper lies in the distinction between the predicate usage and the operator usage of the word “true”. The truth operator is primarily used for characterizing the semantics of the language. Then, (...) we do not need the hierarchy of languages. The truth predicate is mainly used for grammatical function. Tarski’s schema of the truth predicate is not necessary in this proposal. The schema of the word "true" is the schema of the truth operator. The liar paradox (and its cousins) can be solved in this way. In the appendix, I show a consistent model for both of the truth predicate and the truth operator. (shrink)

The most important questions in life are questions about what we should do and what we should believe. The first kind of question has received considerable attention by normative ethicists, who search for a complete systematic account of right action. This book is about the second kind of question. Right Belief and True Belief starts by defining a new field of inquiry named 'normative epistemology' that mirrors normative ethics in searching for a systematic account of right belief. The book (...) then lays out and defends a deeply truth-centric account of right belief called `truth-loving epistemic consequentialism.' Truth-loving epistemic consequentialists say that what we should believe (and what credences we should have) can be understood in terms of what conduces to us having the most accurate beliefs (credences). The view straight-forwardly vindicates the popular intuition that epistemic norms are about getting true beliefs and avoiding false beliefs, and it coheres well with how scientists, engineers, and statisticians think about what we should believe. Many epistemologists have rejected similar views in response to several persuasive objections, most famously including trade-off and counting-blades-of-grass objections. Right Belief and True Belief shows how a simple truth-based consequentialist account of epistemic norms can avoid these objections and argues that truth-loving epistemic consequentialism can undergird a general truth-centric approach to many questions in epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper we present a solution of the axiomatization problem for the Fmla-Fmla versions of the Pietz and Rivieccio exactly true logic and the non-falsity logic dual to it. To prove the completeness of the corresponding binary consequence systems we introduce a specific proof-theoretic formalism, which allows us to deal simultaneously with two consequence relations within one logical system. These relations are hierarchically organized, so that one of them is treated as the basic for the resulting logic, and (...) the other is introduced as an extension of this basic relation. The proposed bi-consequences systems allow for a standard Henkin-style canonical model used in the completeness proof. The deductive equivalence of these bi-consequence systems to the corresponding binary consequence systems is proved. We also outline a family of the bi-consequence systems generated on the basis of the first-degree entailment logic up to the classic consequence. (shrink)

This article engages the global displacement crisis by rendering the concept of ‘home’ as a theological problem for politics, linking contemporary geopolitical conflict to broader issues of forced migration. For help, we engage Simone Weil's theopolitical critique of domination‐based political organising, Hannah Arendt's insights into the texture of political space and belonging, and Jodi Dean's concept of a ‘collective desire for collectivity’ to propose a lateral, connective politics of home that secures local communities while also fostering global connection. Our constructive (...) theological proposal is that the power of love for home entails the embrace of neighbour (near and far) that moves beyond the usual options of liberal cosmopolitanism, communitarian localism, and the Realpolitik of geopolitical alliances. By reconsidering and intensifying the Christian concept of neighbour‐love and linking it to the common reality of displacement and the common longing for home, we take the first steps towards illuming and unveiling a political theology of home that is neither preferential nor naively inclusive. (shrink)

There is good reason to suppose that our best physical theories are false: In addition to its own internal problems, the standard formulation of quantum mechanics is logically incompatible with special relativity. I will also argue that we have no concrete idea what it means to claim that these theories are approximately true.

Is there any reason to discriminate among the rival claims self-proclaimed conservatives make for being truly conservative? This article argues that at least some of these claims can legitimately be dismissed by an independent third. Drawing on and critically interrogating the theories of conservatism provided by Huntington, Oakeshott, as well as Brennan and Hamlin, this article argues that many characterizations of conservatism mistake contingent circumstances explaining why people historically were or conceivably might be reluctant to promote social change for a (...) fully-formed conservative ideology. Not least, risk- and uncertainty-centred accounts, which have gained in popularity as of recently, constitute no viable basis for plausible claims to being truly conservative. Rather than specifying what it takes to be a true conservative, these accounts provide a formalized description of one kind of contingent circumstances that may lead a principled non-conservative to adopt conservative political attitudes. (shrink)

Critics who use historical evidence to challenge scientific realism have deployed a perfectly natural argumentative strategy that has created a profoundly misguided conception of what would be required to vindicate that challenge. I argue that the question fundamentally in dispute in such debates is neither whether particular terms in contemporary scientific theories will be treated as referential nor whether particular existential commitments will be held true by future scientific communities, but whether the future of science will exhibit the same (...) broad pattern of repeated, profound, and unpredictable changes in theoretical orthodoxy that such historicist critics argue characterizes its past. (shrink)

In recent developments in Artificial Intelligence and especially in robotics we can observe a tendency towards building intelligent artefacts that are meant to be social, to have ‘human social’ characteristics like emotions, the ability to conduct dialogue, to learn, to develop personality, character traits, and social competencies. Care, entertainment, pet and educational robots are conceptualised as friendly, understanding partners and credible assistants which communicate ‘naturally’ with users, show emotions and support them in everyday life. Social robots are often designed to (...) interact physically, affectively and socially with humans in order to learn from them. To achieve this goal, roboticists often model the human‐robot interaction on early caregiver‐infant interactions. In this paper I want to analyse prominent visions of these ‘socio‐emotional’ machines as well as early prototypes and commercial products with regard to the human‐machine interface. By means of this I will ask how feminist critiques of technology could be applied to the field of social robotics in which concepts like sociality or emotion are crucial elements while, at the same time, these concepts play an important role in feminist critiques of technology. (shrink)

Because pluralism at its heart is an epistemic problem in philosophy, what is at issue in discussions of philosophical pluralism are the definitions of who counts as a knower and what counts as knowledge. In this philopoetic article, in which philosophic claims are interwoven with poetic and narrative recountings of my own experiences with racist patriarchal violence in the discipline, I argue for an epistemic approach to creating pluralism in philosophy through the satisfaction of seven conditions. These conditions require, at (...) minimum, that we consider the importance of hiring multiply-positioned persons; that we critique patriarchy and white hegemonic discourses; that we rethink assumptions about epistemic credibility; and that we dispense with “perverse dialogues.” Finally, we must encourage “true dialogue” and create a “new dialogic” in philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter provides grounds for thinking that it is the quality of the reasons for the propositional content of our belief-states with true propositional contents, rather than the etiology of those belief-states, that determines whether the belief-state qualifies as knowledge. Normative epistemology rather than naturalized epistemology holds the key to understanding knowledge. This chapter delineates some important features of epistemic luck. It explores the etiology view and presents reasons for concluding that it cannot adequately account for epistemic luck. The (...) chapter then explores the reasons view and shows how it can account for some of the cases that are troublesome for the etiology view. There are many well-discussed and widely accepted counterexamples in the literature for each of the etiology views, with the exception of the virtue-views because those views are still relatively new. (shrink)

In a paper on the logical work of the Jains, Graham Priest considers a consequence relation, semantically characterized, which has a natural analogue in modal logic. Here we give a syntactic/axiomatic description of the modal formulas which are consequences of the empty set by this relation, which is to say: those formulas which are, for every model, true at some point in that model.

_Disaster Psychiatry: Intervening When Nightmares Come True_ captures the state of disaster psychiatry in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This emergent psychiatric specialty, which is increasingly separated from trauma and grief psychiatry on one hand and military psychiatry on the other, provides psychotherapeutic assistance to victims during, and in the weeks and months following, major disasters. As such, disaster psychiatrists must operate in the widely varying locales in which natural and man-made disasters occur, and they (...) must establish their role among the chaotic array of organizations involved in direct disaster response. Editors Anand Pandya and Craig Katz have captured the challenge and promise of disaster psychiatry through first-person narratives. We hear from psychiatrists who have encountered disasters at various stages of their career and in widely varying social, political, and personal contexts. Accounts of psychiatric involvement with adults and children during and after 9/11 have understandable pride of place in this collection. But they are balanced by richly informative narratives about other domestic and international disasters. Fraught with the drama attendant to the events they describe, these essays delineate the dizzying array of challenges that confront the disaster psychiatrist. They range from the intense emotional responses that are part of the aftermath of any disaster, to the need to legitimize a psychiatric presence within diverse cultural and medical contexts, to the subtle task of providing therapeutic boundaries at a time when all rules seem to be suspended. Special attention is given to the daunting task of working with children whose parents' are disaster victims. What emerges from these testimonies is compelling documentation of skilled and compassionate psychiatrists at the outer limits of their specialty, pursuing their calling into uncharted realms of therapeutic engagement. (shrink)

In What Religion Is the British Idealist philosopher Bernard Bosanquet inquires into the essence of religion apprehended as a central human experience which is associated with the dialectical process of the human being’s self-realising endeavour. Bosanquet’s views on religion belong to the second phase of the philosophy of religion of the British Idealists which is characterised by a stronger sense of immanentism. The purpose of this article is, first, to show how Bosanquet’s analysis is based on a conceptual framework which (...) contains notional patterns drawn from a set of normative principles that is derived from his metaphysics. Secondly, the article reconstructs and assesses his views on the meaning and importance of religion and religious consciousness for the human being’s spiritual battle to achieve a state of self-realisation and affirm the spirit that characterises the true content of human nature. Thirdly, the article focuses on the elaboration and crystallisation of the fundamental structural components of Bosanquet’s theory of religion that constitute the conceptual framework of his philosophical project. Throughout, I emphasise that Bosanquet’s analysis of religion is an integral part of his moral and social ontology, the inmost essence of which is the concept of good as the only real and final end of the human being’s struggle for the realisation of the true or real self. It is my contention that Bosanquet defends from the idealistic standpoint a theory of religion that reveals in an original way the essence of religious consciousness in its relation to the meaning of the finite individual’s life. The comprehensive understanding of Bosanquet’s position in What Religion Is presupposes, however, prior knowledge of the basic concepts of his metaphysics. The strength of Bosanquet’s theory of religion derives from: its metaphysical foundation; and its implications for the individual’s ethical and social life. Its contribution to the philosophy of religion lies in the fact that it offers a viable alternative theory to the foundationalist-evidentialist view of religious faith. (shrink)

In their 1978 paper, psychologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff posed the question, “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” They treated this question as interchangeable with the inquiry, “Does a chimpanzee make inferences about another individual, in any degree or kind?” Here, we offer an alternative way of thinking about this issue, positing that while chimpanzees may not possess a theory of mind in the strict sense, we ought to think of them as enactive perceivers of practical and (...) social affordances. As such, we reframe the question: “Are chimpanzees socially enactive?”. (shrink)

ANY SCHOLAR INVESTIGATING ARISTOTLE’S ACCOUNT of φρόνησις sooner or later encounters the question whether φρόνησις concerns means to the ends of human actions or those ends themselves. There is an abundance of literature, mostly French, on the topic; nevertheless, the question is worthy of reconsideration, because an element essential to answering the question, namely an understanding of the ends of human action or πρᾶξις, has not received adequate treatment in the literature to date. One reason for this oversight is that (...) Aristotle defines πρᾶξις as having its end in itself, in distinction from ποίησις which has its end in something external to itself. Hence, when Aristotle says in Nicomachean Ethics 3 that actions are for the sake of things other than themselves, scholars have tended to conclude that Aristotle is confusing moral action and poietic action in this passage. In addition, there is an ambiguity about the very notion of an end in the Nicomachean Ethics which has not been fully recognized and explained. It is clear from the beginning that happiness is the end of ethics; yet it is worthy of note that Aristotle speaks of ends both in the singular and in the plural. If πρᾶξις is a specific action in specific circumstances, and if, as Aristotle says, it has its end in itself, how are we to understand these ends, or this one end, happiness, as the end of a particular action? Could it be in fact the case that practical actions have ends other than themselves, as the passage from Nichomachean Ethics 3 suggests? Since Aristotle says that the principles of actions are their ends, is there one end which unifies moral activity? How can an indeterminate end such as happiness, the supreme good, be the real end of a specific action? To answer these questions we will need to explain, in a manner consistent with Aristotle’s other statements, how moral action has its end, how it can have an end other than itself, and what are the different perspectives in which things can be regarded as ends. We will then be in a better position to reconsider what it is that makes our actions moral and how the morality of our actions is related to φρόνησις in its role as the discerner of practical truth. (shrink)

This article analyzes articles appearing in True Story from 1920 to 1985 that concern women's grief after pregnancy and child loss. They are discussed as a historical link between nineteenth-century consolation literature and current psychological and academic discussions of grief. True Story is a confession magazine marketed for working-class women, whose reproductive losses have generally been minimized or ignored by previous literary and current professional and journalistic treatments of maternal grief. Articles are examined within the constructs of confession (...) literature and within the larger context of women's popular literature. Like working-class women's experiences of reproductive loss, these areas have been largely overlooked, dismissed, or denigrated by literary scholars and sociologists. The moral tone of True Story gives women's first-person narratives about infant death and pregnancy an ambiguous prescriptive quality, in that both self-empowerment and self-blame are recommended. True Story reinforces traditional notions of motherhood and femininity, but subtly challenges patriarchal class relations in American society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Prophetic Evangelicals: Envisioning a Just and Peaceable Kingdom ed. by Bruce Ellis Benson, Malinga Elizabeth Berry, and Peter Goodwin Heltzel, and: Bearing True Witness: Truthfulness in Christian Practice by Craig HoveyGuenther “Gene” HaasReview of Prophetic Evangelicals: Envisioning a Just and Peaceable Kingdom EDITED BY BRUCE ELLIS BENSON, MALINGA ELIZABETH BERRY, AND PETER GOODWIN HELTZEL Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. 225 pp. $35.00Review of Bearing True Witness: (...) Truthfulness in Christian Practice CRAIG HOVEY Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011. 258 pp. $27.00Christian thought and practice in North America—especially in the evangelical world—has undergone significant changes in recent years. Prophetic Evangelicals and Bearing True Witness deal with two areas where this is evident: first, the attention many evangelicals are now giving to social justice and peace and, second, their determination to witness to the truth about Christ in a manner consistent with the Christian gospel. Prophetic evangelicals is the name the editors apply to a new generation of evangelicals who believe that the gospel of Christ requires a commitment to proclaim and embody “the just and peaceable kingdom” (2). These evangelicals view Jesus as inaugurating “a new social order that is a radical alternative to the order of empire” (7).This trend among evangelicals to move beyond the preaching of the gospel in a narrow sense (over against the liberals’ emphasis on social justice) is the culmination of a trend that has been happening since the publication in 1947 of Carl Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. What is new about many younger evangelicals in recent decades is their embrace of the Anabaptist perspective on justice and peace. It is clear in the introductory and concluding chapters by the editors—with their appeals to John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas and their references to the “cultural captivity” of the church—that this is the trend they have in mind. One also reads hints of liberation theology in the editors’ references to the needs of the people being “holy” (12), to God’s being on the side of—and the gospel always being in favor of—the “least” (47), and to a critique of “the order of empire” (7). Of course, [End Page 221] non-Anabaptist evangelicals are also concerned with these themes as part of their commitment to justice and peace. But it is the distinctive emphasis of this book—with some exceptions among the contributors—that it highlights the ways Anabaptist evangelicals are prophetic.The chapters consist of expositions on the following biblical themes: creation, shalom, justice, kingdom, news, Mary, the cross, church, freedom, reconciliation, resurrection, and hope. The authors include a wide range of evangelicals: from a Kuyperian (Vincent Bacote on creation) to a committed Anabaptist (David Gushee on shalom), to postcolonial Christians (Gabriel Salguero on the cross, and Raymond Alfred on freedom). Although the term is slippery, the inclusion of two contributors raises the question about who the editors consider to be an “evangelical”: Helen Slessarov-Jamir (on justice) agrees with her students’ desire not to learn theology from “dead white men” (77) and embraces religious pluralism (85); Pamela Lightsey (on reconciliation) embraces liberalism and liberation theology and calls herself a “womanist theologian” (169).The chapters contain a diversity of contributions in length and quality. Some are good, short expositions of themes: creation (Bacote), kingdom (Christian Collins Winn), Mary—actually about suffering—(Ruth Padilla DeBorst), church (John Franke), and resurrection (Cherith Fee Nordling). Gushee’s chapter contains a good exposition of the Anabaptist view of shalom, along with typical sweeping statements about the “Constantinian compromise” and the evangelical compromise with the state (72). Two chapters deserve special recognition. Chris Boesel’s chapter, “News,” is an excellent account of the Christian call to justice as part of the full goodness of the gospel. He criticizes both liberal-progressive and evangelical-conservative assumptions about the church’s mission and calls for a “recovering evangelical faith” that pursues justice with repentance, humility, and a reliance on the Holy Spirit. Telford Work’s chapter, “Hope,” also articulates a perceptive critique of the activism of both the Christian Right and the Christian Left. Rejecting all alignments with worldly power, he calls on the... (shrink)

Whether people praise, worship, criticize, or reject God, they all presuppose at least a rough notion of what it means to talk about God. Turning the certainty of this assumption on its head, Steinberger shows that when we are talking about God, we are in fact talking about nothing at all -- there is literally no such idea -- and so all of the arugments we hear from atheists, true believers, and agnostics are and will always be self-defeating.

A process of idea filtration in two distinct streams of physics i.e., 1) The dimensionality perspective of spacetime, and 2) The quantum perspective leads us to an understanding of what might be a true reality of all that we perceive. The conclusions arrived at in this paper are a bit perplexing in the sense that our perceived reality could be a manifestation of a combination of 4D + n (n > 0) flat space-time, universal wave function, and cognizance. The (...) work is based on a review and analysis of the main concepts in quantum theory, relativistic physics, and cosmology. Key ideas and conclusions are filtered and logically connected to arrive at what might be a view of the true reality. A significant part of the paper is dedicated to the concept of the “observer” and the “ability of cognizance” that should accompany the “observer”. Though the “observer” is central to modern physics, it is not known what constitutes observation, and the term observer, often open to interpretations, does not have a standard definition and hence, is lacking in clarity. In our analysis, we have argued that the environment, in which the observer-observed system is embedded, emerges as an all-knowing, cognizant, and ideal observer that has the knowledge of the observer-observed system. At a philosophical level, we link to the fundamentals of physics, “consciousness” or “ability of cognizance” as an unavoidable and key element in not only carrying out the observation but perhaps, as believed by many, having a role in shaping the reality perceived. In the review and analysis of another stream of physics, that of General Theory of Relativity (GTR) and cosmology, we examine the question of reality from a cosmological and dimensionality perspective. Research on the 4D and 5D constructs of the universe indicates that the “reality” perceived in 4D spacetime as matter, distance, time, etc., is a manifestation of a higher dimensional 4D + n (n > 0) reality. Theoretical research on this front points towards a 4D-spacetime embedded in a 5D or higher dimensional flat space with matter and energy being a manifestation of the higher dimensions. The flow of logic in this paper leans towards a view of an ultimate true reality that is flat 4D + n (n > 0) space combined with cognizance, universal wave function, and the environment. (shrink)

Background Truth-telling in health care is about providing patients with accurate information about their diagnoses and prognoses to enable them to make decisions that can benefit their overall health. Physicians worldwide, especially in the United Kingdom (U.K.) and the United States (U.S.), openly share such medical information. Bangladesh, however, is a Muslim-majority society with different social norms than Western societies. Therefore, we examined whether Muslim culture supports truth disclosure for patients, particularly how and to what extent medical information about life-threatening (...) diseases is provided to patients in Bangladesh. Methods This was a phenomenological qualitative study. We conducted thirty in-depth interviews with clinicians, nurses, patients and their relatives at Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We also used observations to explore interactions between patients, families and healthcare professionals regarding their involvement in medical decisions and truth disclosure issues. NVivo software was used to identify common themes, and a thematic analysis method was utilised to analyse the datasets. Results This study identified three recurring themes relevant to the ethics and practice of truth disclosure: best interest rather than autonomy, the ambivalent value of deception and who understands what. The participants revealed that physicians often withhold fatal medical prognoses from terminally ill patients to ensure the best healthcare outcomes. The results indicate that deception towards patients is commonly accepted as a means of reducing burden and providing comfort. The participants opined that true medical information should be withheld from some patients, assuming that such disclosures may create a severe burden on them. Whether or to what extent medical information is disclosed primarily depends on a family’s wishes and preferences. Conclusions While truth disclosure to patients is considered an ethical norm in many cultures, such as in the U.K. and the U.S., the practice of concealing or partially revealing severe medical prognoses to patients is an actual medical practice in Bangladeshi society. This study emphasises the importance of recognising a patient’s active involvement and respecting the cultural values that shape family involvement in medical decision-making. These findings may have significant policy and practical implications for promoting patient autonomy within Bangladeshi family dynamics and religious-based cultural values. (shrink)

Addresses the current arguments about homosexuality and suggests solutions.