Los Comités Hospitalarios de Bioética (CHB) tienen la atribución de emitir sugerencias al personal de salud, ante casos clínicos difíciles que involucran problemas y/o dilemas bioéticos. A nivel mundial, y también en México, se encontró poca literatura relacionada, generando en ocasiones cierto grado de incertidumbre en los profesionales de la salud para su resolución. Objetivo: describir los motivos de presentación de casos clínicos de pacientes ante el CHB en un hospital de segundo nivel, desde junio de 2007 a junio de (...) 2018. Método: estudio observacional, descriptivo, retrospectivo y transversal; la muestra fue por conveniencia y se obtuvieron 48 registros de minutas. Resultados: el motivo de consulta más frecuente ante los CHB fue el apoyo en la decisión para la limitación del esfuerzo terapéutico, con 24 casos (50%). Se identificaron 34 dilemas bioéticos (71%) y 14 problemas bioéticos (29%). Conclusiones: ayudará a los servicios médicos tratantes a identificar e intervenir oportunamente, al basarse en situaciones previas sobre dilemas y/o problemas bioéticos. (shrink)

Las directrices anticipadas aún no se encuentran legisladas en todos los estados de la República mexicana. En algunos de los estados en los que sí se encuentran legisladas, se prohíbe expresamente su validez durante el periodo de gestación. Lo anterior representa dilemas bioéticos y jurídicos importantes, los cuales revisamos para esclarecer las diversas interrogantes que surgen en materia de la protección tanto del bebé como de la madre gestante. Concluimos que existe una necesidad de desarrollar una ley federal que homologue (...) las directrices anticipadas, garantizando una muerte digna a todos los mexicanos, y que establezca que en caso de encontrarse en periodo de gestación, se busque asesoría por un comité de bioética que apoye a determinar en cada caso particular, las condiciones que favorezcan el desarrollo y supervivencia del bebé, siempre que sea posible, sin recurrir a tratamientos y/o medidas extraordinarias que pongan el riesgo la muerte digna y libre de sufrimiento de la madre. (shrink)

Why should we care what happens to future generations? Samuel Scheffler argues that we are more invested in the fate of our descendants than we may realize. Implicit in our own attachments are powerful reasons for wanting the chain of human generations to persist into the indefinite future under conditions conducive to human flourishing.

“There is no world of thought that is not a world of language,” Walter Benjamin remarked, “and one only sees in the world what is preconditioned by ...

Samuel J. Kerstein develops a new, broadly Kantian account of the ethical issues that arise when a person treats another merely as a means. He explores how Kantian principles on the dignity of persons shed light on pressing issues in modern bioethics, including the distribution of scarce medical resources and the regulation of markets in organs.

*Please email me for a copy of the paper if you are interested! -/- Liberal theories of animal consciousness maintain that we should attribute consciousness widely across various species. Conservative theories of animal consciousness maintain that we should not attribute consciousness widely. This paper makes a case for a conservative theory of animal consciousness. The case depends on two defensive moves and one offensive move. The defensive moves indicate that the indistinguishable causal profiles of conscious and non-conscious mental states are (...) not a problem for conservative theories and that intuitions about animal consciousness should not play a role in theory selection. Offensively, I argue that liberal theories of animal consciousness are less parsimonious than conservative theories. The upshot is that liberal theories of animal consciousness are not obviously rationally preferable to conservative theories. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 320-333, July 2022.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1994, given by Samuel Scheffler, an American philosopher.

Understanding inductive reasoning is a problem that has engaged mankind for thousands of years. This problem is relevant to a wide range of fields and is integral to the philosophy of science. It has been tackled by many great minds ranging from philosophers to scientists to mathematicians, and more recently computer scientists. In this article we argue the case for Solomonoff Induction, a formal inductive framework which combines algorithmic information theory with the Bayesian framework. Although it achieves excellent theoretical results (...) and is based on solid philosophical foundations, the requisite technical knowledge necessary for understanding this framework has caused it to remain largely unknown and unappreciated in the wider scientific community. The main contribution of this article is to convey Solomonoff induction and its related concepts in a generally accessible form with the aim of bridging this current technical gap. In the process we examine the major historical contributions that have led to the formulation of Solomonoff Induction as well as criticisms of Solomonoff and induction in general. In particular we examine how Solomonoff induction addresses many issues that have plagued other inductive systems, such as the black ravens paradox and the confirmation problem, and compare this approach with other recent approaches. (shrink)

The philosophy of Henri Maldiney has played an important role in the evolution of French philosophy, especially its phenomenological strand. Maldiney's ideas have to a large extent developed from a close study of psychopathology. In this article, I present some of the key principles of Maldineyan thought, which has found little recognition to date in Anglophone philosophy and psychopathology. My main purpose is to explain the psychopathological and therapeutic implications of these principles. First, I make a few observations about Maldiney's (...) life and then sum up some of the main concepts of Maldineyan thought, such as sensing, rhythm, and, most important, openness to the event. Based on these concepts... (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction A Global Distribution Principle? Problems with Globalizing the Difference Principle Conclusion Notes.

Suppose that a young athlete has just become quadriplegic. He expects to live several more decades, but out of self‐interest he autonomously chooses to engage in physician‐assisted suicide (PAS) or voluntary active euthanasia (VAE). Some of us are unsure whether he or his physician would be acting rightly in ending his life. One basis for such doubt is the notion that persons have dignity in a Kantian sense. This paper probes responses that David Velleman and Frances Kamm have suggested to (...) the question of whether participating in PAS or VAE to benefit oneself, as the young man might, respects the dignity of persons, specified in an orthodox Kantian way. Velleman claims that it does not, while Kamm insists that, in certain circumstances, it does. I argue against Kamm's position. I go on to contend that while orthodox Kantianism might provide a basis for moral concern regarding the case of the young quadriplegic, it suffers from two serious shortcomings. First, it implies that terminally ill patients are wrong to request VAE or engage in PAS to avoid intense suffering, at least when this suffering has not yet overwhelmed their reason. Second, orthodox Kantianism implies that it is wrong for physicians to withdraw such patients from life‐sustaining treatments, even if they request it. To remedy these shortcomings, I sketch an unorthodox Kantian account of respect for the dignity of persons. This account promises to capture the idea that it would be morally problematic for doctors to help the young quadriplegic to die, but to avoid the shortcomings of an orthodox Kantian account. (shrink)

If one is interested in reasoning counterfactually within a physical theory, one cannot adequately use the standard possible world semantics. As developed by Lewis and others, this semantics depends on entertaining possible worlds with miracles, worlds in which laws of nature, as described by physical theory, are violated. Van Fraassen suggested instead to use the models of a theory as worlds, but gave up on determining the needed comparative similarity relation for the semantics objectively. I present a third way, in (...) which this similarity relation is determined from properties of the models contextually relevant to the truth of the counterfactual under evaluation. After illustrating this with a simple example from thermodynamics, I draw some implications for future work, including a renewed possibility for a viable deflationary account of laws of nature. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with counterfactual logic and its implications for the modal status of mathematical claims. It is most directly a response to an ambitious program by Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne, who seek to establish that mathematics is committed to its own necessity. I demonstrate that their assumptions collapse the counterfactual conditional into the material conditional. This collapse entails the success of counterfactual strengthening, which is controversial within counterfactual logic, and which has counterexamples within pure and applied mathematics. I close (...) by discussing the dispensability of counterfactual conditionals within the language of mathematics. (shrink)

In this paper I am going to raise a problem for recent attempts to derive positive duties from Kant’s universalizability tests. In particular, I argue that these recent attempts are subject to reductio and that the most obvious way of patching them renders them impracticable. I begin by explaining the motivation for these attempts. Then I describe how they work and begin my attack. I conclude by considering some patches.

Leibniz is an eclectic and ecumenical philosopher. He often worked out philosophical positions that reconciled seemingly opposed theoretical systems and chastised people for rejecting certain views too quickly. In this paper, I describe one episode of Leibnizian reconciliation. My target is the phenomenon of deliberation. Traditionally, philosophers have offered two different accounts of deliberation based on two different accounts of the compatibility of freedom and determinism. Leibniz, I argue, cannot accept either account because of his broader theoretical commitments. This leads (...) Leibniz to formulate an interesting account of deliberation that adopts certain elements from each account while excising the untoward aspects of each one. I outline the various mechanisms involved in deliberation on Leibniz’s view and show how deliberation fits into a broader theory of free action. I close with an assessment of whether Leibniz in fact succeeds in offering an account of deliberation that is distinct from the traditional positions. (shrink)

Uno de los motivos recurrentes del pensamiento contemporáneo, es la indagación sobre el concepto, la representación y la valoración de la comunidad como una dimensión de la experiencia, en particular en su incidencia política/impolítica. Pero "comunidad" se ha manifestado como un "semantema" elusivo, es decir, una familia de nociones y asociaciones significativas, que abren y complejizan más y más la búsqueda de un concepto preciso, hasta empujarnos hacia las típicas "vías negativas" para la caracterización o definición del mismo. A modo (...) de hipótesis, sin pretender con ello construir un esquema abarcador, sostendré que hay un núcleo estético en ese semantema, aludiendo con "estética" a la presencia, en el punto pivote de la constelación que delimita "lo comunitario", de términos como sonido/silencio, diferencia, doble, forma, identidad, imagen y semejanza. Se trata mayormente, como es evidente, de significaciones construidas sobre los planos auditivo y visual de lo sensorio. Como una especificación de dicha hipótesis, ensayaré la elaboración de una noción de comunidad a partir de la pregunta acerca de cuándo hay comunidad. La respuesta a articular, es que hay comunidad cuando hay imagen, esto es, corporización de una semejanza y de un sentido, capaces de conjurar tanto la amenaza de lo informe como la de la forma sin semejanza. El fundamento último de esta hipótesis, es que nuestro ser-en-común originario toma consistencia en el plano de lo sensible porque se vincula a la insuficiencia de toda representación para subordinarlo a un concepto, pues se presenta aquí, entre comunidad y concepto, la misma distancia infranqueable que hay entre la existencia y su teorización. One of the recurrent motifs of contemporary thought is the inquiry about the concept, representation and valuation of community as a dimension of experience, particularly in its political/impolitic influence. But "community" has proved to be an elusive semanteme, i.e., a family of notions and significant associations that make the search for a precise concept very complex, pushing us to the typical "negative ways" for its characterization or definition. As a hypothesis, and with no intention of building an all-encompassing frame, I will hold that there is an aesthetic nucleus to this semanteme, understanding "aesthetic" as the presence of terms such as sound/silence, difference, double, shape, identity, image and likeness, occurring at the very pivot point of the constellation that defines "the communitarian". It refers mostly to significances related to the hearing and seeing senses. Following this hypothesis, I will try to define a notion of community answering the question of when a community occurs. The answer to this being that there is a community when there is an image; that is, the embodiment of a likeness and a sense that can thwart the threat of what is shapeless or of a shape with no likeness. The ultimate foundation of this hypothesis is that our original being-in-common becomes consistent to the senses because of its inability to subordinate to a concept, as happens with any representation, being the unbridgeable distance between community and its concept the same there is between existence and its theorization. (shrink)

Recently, we (Synthese, 199(5–6):13247–13281, 2021) proposed Kripke-like semantics for two quantum logics of interderminacy. These logics expand the vocabulary of standard Birkhoff-von Neumann propositional quantum logic with a pair of modal operators interpreted as “it is (in)determinate that”, allowing them to express in the object language statements such as “it is indeterminate that system S is spin-up in the x-direction”, as well as statements of any logical complexity involving ascriptions of (in)determinacy. We present an axiomatization of a logic closely related (...) to one of these quantum logics of indeterminacy and prove that this axiomatization is sound and complete with respect to the Kripke-like semantics. We then prove that this logic is decidable. (shrink)

We analyze two problems in mathematics – the first (stated in our title) is extracted from Wittgenstein’s “Philosophy for Mathematicians”; the second (“What set of numbers is non-denumerable?”) is taken from Cantor. We then consider, by way of comparison, a problem in musical aesthetics concerning a Brahms variation on a theme by Haydn. Our aim is to bring out and elucidate the essentially riddle-like character of these problems.

This book, the third in the series of Samuel Hollander's essays, covers twelve key studies on the economic theory and method of John Stuart Mill. This volume provides an accessible sourcebook on Mill's relationship with David Ricardo, and the 'Classical School', as well as confirming his relevance for modern economics and for the place of economics within the social sciences.

Yearly pediatric cardiac surgery missions to Ghana are of tremendous benefit to local children, but may create thorny ethical dilemmas for local clinicians who refer and screen children for the mission and who provide care to the children after the mission concludes for the year. This article presents the experiences and concerns of a pediatrician who is a local member of the Hearts and Minds of Ghana project.

Plato's Parmenides divides up into two main parts, the first ostensibly devoted to a series of criticisms launched by a venerable Parmenides against a theory of Forms previously articulated by a youthful Socrates, the second consisting of a virtually unbroken series of deductions to seemingly incompatible conclusions. As such, the dialogue poses a serious interpretative challenge, for it is unclear what conclusions Plato expected his readers to draw from both parts and how the conclusion of Part II is supposed to (...) bear on the conclusion of Part I. (shrink)

A large-scale field experiment in Rotterdam, Netherlands, tested whether nudging could increase public transport use. During one work week, 4000 commuters on six bus lines, received a free travel card holder. On the three bus lines in the experimental condition, the card holders displayed a social label that branded bus passengers as sustainable travelers because of their bus use. On the three bus lines in the control condition, there was no such message on the card holders. Analysis of the number (...) of rides per hour showed that the intervention led to a change from pre-intervention to post-intervention period that was estimated to be 1.18 rides per day greater on experimental lines than on control lines. This experiment shows that public transport operators can increase public transport use by incorporating messages that positively label passengers as sustainable travelers in their communication strategies. (shrink)

Many philosophers read Hegel as rejecting Kant's ethics of duty and advocating a more or less Aristotelian conception of virtue. However, in the Philosophy of Right Hegel sharply criticizes the ancient conception of virtue, or “virtue proper,” in his terms, and distinguishes it from a more modern concept of virtue, which he calls “rectitude.” In this paper I argue that interpretations that overlook or downplay the significance of the distinction between rectitude and virtue proper are wrong, and I also put (...) forward my own positive interpretation of Hegel's views on virtue. I am mainly concerned with defending two sets of claims: (1) Rectitude is fundamentally different from Aristotelian and other ancient conceptions of virtue. (2) Hegel believes that in modern society acting with rectitude is, in all normal circumstances, superior to attempting to use virtue proper to try to figure out what one should do. I also argue that the conception of virtue I attribute to Hegel has some distinct advantages over Aristotelian conceptions of virtue. (shrink)

Friedrich Engels, in 1895, reissued Marx's 'The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850', with an Introduction endorsing peaceful political tactics. We review the primary evidence to bring order to a confusing picture that emerges from a range of conflicting interpretations of the document. Our conclusions are as follows: First, the 1895 Introduction does not signify a new position, considering Engels' recognition over several decades of political concessions by the British ruling class. Secondly, since from the 1840s Marx too had applauded the (...) potential of the 'Social Democratic' route, at least under the appropriate conditions, we may be confident that he would have approved of Engels' Introduction. Thirdly, the case for universal suffrage was to set the foundations for a classless communist system; Engels, we show, would have found unacceptable a Parliamentary system generating a working-class majority unwilling to carry out a communist program, or a working-class electorate choosing to replace the party at the polls. (shrink)