An d rew Ku per begins his cri ti que of my vi ews on poverty by accepti n g the crux of my moral argument: The interests of all persons ought to count equally, and geographic location and citizenship m a ke no intrinsic differen ce to the ri gh t s and obl i ga ti ons of i n d ivi du a l s . Ku per also sets out some key facts about global poverty, for (...) example, that 30,000 children die every day from preventable illness and starvation, while most people in devel oped nati on s have plenty of disposable income that they s pend on lu x u ries and items that sati s f y mere wants, not basic needs. Yet after summarizing an essay I wrote for the New York Times Magazine in which I argued that the avera ge Am erican family should don a te a l a r ge porti on of t h eir income to or ga n i z ati ons like UNICEF and Ox f a m , Ku per wri te s : “ But if Si n ger ’s ex h ort a ti ons make you want to act immediately in the ways he recom m en d s , you s h ould not do so.” Why not? Because the approach I advoc a te “would seriously harm the poor.” These are strong words. It is startling to be told that a substantial transfer of resources from comfortably-off American families to UNICEF or Oxfam would harm the poor. What abo ut those 3 0,0 0 0 ch i l d ren dyi n g from preventable illness and starvation? In its 2001 fund-raising material,the U.S. Committee for UNICEF says that a donation of $17 will provide immunization “to protect a child for life against the six leading ch i l d - killing and maiming diseases:measles,polio. (shrink)

While there is significant consensus that undergraduate medical education should include bioethics training, there is widespread debate about how to teach bioethics to medical students. Educators disagree about course methods and approaches, the topics that should be covered, and the effectiveness and metrics for UME ethics training. One issue that has received scant attention is the timing of bioethics education during medical training. The existing literature suggests that most medical ethics education occurs in the pre-clinical years. Follow-up studies indicate that (...) medical students in their clinical rotations have little recall or ability to apply ethics concepts that were learned in their pre-clinical training. Trainees also report a desire for medical ethics to be taught in the context of practical application, which would suggest that the timing of pre-clinical ethics education is flawed. However, moving bioethics training to the clinical years should not be assumed to be the solution to the problems of recall and theory application. We argue that the effectiveness of timing bioethics education will depend on when medical students witness or experience particular categories of ethical dilemmas during their training. Our overarching hypothesis is that ethics education will be most effective when the bioethics training on a particular topic correlates to experiential exposure to that ethical issue. The purpose of our current study was to describe medical students exposure to particular categories of ethical conflicts, dilemmas, or issues. Our results may help bioethics educators better strategize about the most effective timing of medical ethics training in UME. (shrink)

Published within weeks of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, Isabelle Duncan's Pre-Adamite Man (1860) is the first full-length treatment of preadamism by an evangelical. Intended as a reconciliation of Genesis and geology, Duncan's work gained immediacy when it was published shortly after the September 1859 revelations that men had walked among the mammoths. Written in the tradition of evangelical 'Christian philosophy', Pre-Adamite Man deploys innovative biblical hermeneutics and recent trends in geology to set out both a biblical preadamite theory, and (...) an unorthodox angelology. Duncan responded to contemporary secular interpretations of geology by pushing evangelical concordist strategies to new frontiers, filling out an acceptance of an ancient earth with new biblically informed catastrophist proposals and extensions of salvation history, while simultaneously retaining a firm commitment to plenary inspiration. The product is a highly readable book that operates both as an accessible treatment of geology and a theological discourse. Running through six printings between 1860 and 1866, the book was reviewed by many of the period's leading journals and created a minor controversy among evangelicals. This study both brings to life this previously neglected episode in scriptural geology, and adds to recent work on Victorian popular science writing. (shrink)

Einstein, in his “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper”, gave a physical (operational) meaning to “time” of a remote event in describing “motion” by introducing the concept of “synchronous stationary clocks located at different places”. But with regard to “place” in describing motion, he assumed without analysis the concept of a system of co-ordinates.In the present paper, we propose a way of giving physical (operational) meaning to the concepts of “place” and “co-ordinate system”, and show how the observer can define both the (...) place and time of a remote event. Following Einstein, we consider another system “in uniform motion of translation relatively to the former”. Without assuming “the properties of homogeneity which we attribute to space and time”, we show that the definitions of space and time in the two systems are linearly related. We deduce some novel consequences of our approach regarding faster-than-light observers and particles, “one-way” and “two-way” velocities of light, symmetry, the “group property” of inertial reference frames, length contraction and time dilatation, and the “twin paradox”. Finally, we point out a flaw in Einstein’s argument in the “Electrodynamical Part” of his paper and show that the Lorentz force formula and Einstein’s formula for transformation of field quantities are mutually consistent. We show that for faster-than-light bodies, a simple modification of Planck’s formula for mass suffices. (Except for the reference to Planck’s formula, we restrict ourselves to Physics of 1905.). (shrink)

P¯an.ini’s grammar includes several types of metarules which determine how its operational rules apply. Among them are “traffic rules” which constrain how rules interact with each other in grammatical derivations. These are typically formulated as designating a rule or class of rules asiddha “not effected” (or asiddhavat “as if not effected”) with respect to another rule or class of rules. For economy, the rules so designated are grouped into several sections, whose headings collectively declare them to be asiddha(vat). The biggest (...) such section, under the famous heading 8.2.1 p ¯urvatr¯asiddham, extends from 8.2.1 through the end of the grammar (8.4.68), and is hence called the Trip¯ad¯ı ‘Three Sections’. (shrink)

I.Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (1927; revised 1932 and 1933) has come to be widely recognized as a work of rare insight into the formative logic of the state. Much less apparent is that implicit within this theoretical distillation is a new type of political history. There is every indication—given the philosophical, theological, and aesthetic aspects of Schmitt's writings, no less than his overtly personal beliefs in this regard—that a history of the political relative to the modern state, (...) which is the focus of his historical interest, would entail more than the mere rarefaction of traditional, pragmatic…. (shrink)

The current Medicare prospective payment system has many positive incentives for hospitals to control costs. Hospitals are increasing outpatient surgery, decreasing admissions, decreasing length of stay, and decreasing use of ancillary services. These are just the effects that Congress and the Health Care Financing Administration hoped for to save the Medicare trust fund. However, there has been evidence of some adverse outcomes including premature discharge, “dumping” sicker patients and patients without insurance, and adverse impact on hospitals with specialty centers. We (...) examine these issues and present a possible solution based on a new Computerized Severity Index. (shrink)

This “current controversies” contribution describes the recent case of a severely disabled six year old girl who has been subjected to a range of medical interventions at the request of her parents and with the permission of a hospital clinical ethics committee. The interventions prescribed have become known as “the Ashley treatment” and involve the performance of invasive medical procedures (eg, hysterectomy) and oestrogen treatment. A central aim of the treatment is to restrict the growth of the child and thus (...) make it easier for her parents to care for her at home. The paper below discusses the main objections to the treatment. It concludes that the most serious concern raised by the case is that it may set a worrying precedent if the moral principle employed in justification of the treatment is applied again to endorse it in similar circumstances. Finally, it raises the possibility that that same moral principle may even be invoked to justify more radical interventions than those that were actually performed in the Ashley treatment. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of a work by Adam Smith. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

This paper discusses the distinction between disability and handicap as it is proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in their publication International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicaps (WHO, 1993 (first published, 1980)). Following criticism of this an attempt to salvage the distinction by Nordenfelt (1993, 1983) is discussed. It is argued that neither the WHO nor Nordenfelt are successful in their attempts to preserve the distinction between disability and handicap in a theoretically wellmotivated manner. Contrary to the WHO, (...) it is argued that what they term ‘disabilities’ and ‘handicaps’ both have external causes. And contrary to Nordenfelt's position it is shown that “basic actions” do not provide a firm theoretical foundation for the concept of disability. Moreover, the criticisms of these two sets of views reveal that attempts to describe the phenomenon of disablement which focus on the individual suffer from a serious methodological shortcoming. (shrink)

This article addresses the aesthetic status of gargoyles in medieval Gothic architecture. Irreducible to the grotesque yet manifestly discrepant with the core of cathedral and monastic buildings, the gargoyle serves as an entry point for an exploration of the stylistic relations comprising the Gothic and reflecting the cultural duality of the ecclesiastic sites of its historical emergence. The relation between gargoyles and the bulk of Gothic structures and ornamentation is discussed in terms of an “aesthetics of contrast.”.