Life-support technology may become a death-prolonging horror, and some people may fear that an over-intellectualized interpretation of traditional moral teaching has led us astray from what a compassionate God wills for the dying. The author addresses this fear. Those who defend “orthodox” teaching on end-of-life issues have a serious obligation not to obscure the compassion implicit in the traditional distinction between ordinary and extraordinary means. There is no medical or moral obligation to prolong dying or make it more burdensome with (...) interventions that offer little benefit, and there is nothing immoral about pain relief. What is prohibited is killing: any action or omission that has the express or implicit purpose of ending a life. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.4 (Winter 2010): 695–705. (shrink)

This paper will describe the methodology for teaching legal English used at the Fordham University School of Law’s Legal English Institute, a one-semester program for law students and attorneys. Reasonable minds may disagree about the most effective methodology for teaching legal English, or for that matter any other form of academic English, but we have developed an approach that is informed by both theory and practice. At LEI, we use a “modified CLIL” format, with four substantive classes on topics in (...) U.S. law that run in parallel with a core class on legal English. All four substantive classes use authentic reading materials that are similar to those used in an LL.M. program, and these materials are recycled in the legal English class and form the basis of discussions about language issues. Our use of content classes to elicit language issues has proven to be effective and it also helps keep students motivated, as students tend to have more intrinsic interest in legal topics than in language study per se. (shrink)

This article provides Catholic authorities with a useful framework for forming prudent and just policies to minimize clerical child sexual abuse, exploiting the 2011 John Jay College report Causes and Context while not ignoring its shortcomings. The framework is St. Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of prudence, and a “profile” of the clerical perpetrators is developed that uses their narcissism as a middle term to explain why these men behaved the way they did. The author concludes by recommending a deterrent policy similar (...) to the policy advocated by St. Paul, which does not unrealistically aim at an angelic clergy but aims to deter those who would enter the priesthood for its benefits. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.2 (Summer 2013): 299–311. (shrink)

The author describes a team taught (philosophy/agriculture) professional ethics in agriculture course at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. He shows how the teaching, student selection (half agriculture, half non-agriculture), topic selection and class projects (mock public forums on critical issues aimed at achieving a public consensus) were chosen to achieve one main goal, a professional ethics aimed at public service. A second goal, public awareness of the legitimate needs of agriculture, is pursued simultaneously.The public-good orientation of this model of professional (...) ethics is distinguished from the frequent professional-defensive role found in other fields. The author indicates that agriculture's need for publicly effective and credible leadership makes the older defensive models useless today as well as wrong, given the common-good goals of ethics.A short list of goals of agriculture is proposed: sufficient, sustainable and healthy food/fiber supplies by means which respect the dignity of all participants. From these goals it is claimed that consensus “first principles” of agricultural ethics can be constructed. More fundamental first principles, such as the golden rule, are given their appropriate role.From these some simple criteria for the problem solving efforts of the students are suggested: broad consideration of technical and human impacts (no dismissal of impacts as “externalities”), awareness of the need for technical information, consideration of risk-reducing alternative tools or policies, and fair, humane and consistent risk/benefit analysis.The author concludes with a description of the impact on students, the importance of the role model of agriculture teachers in the course with the resultant importance of the team-taught format, and the need for special administrative support to attain the goals of the course. (shrink)

The prominent, though not exclusive, role of basic needs strategies to attain ethically acceptable development goals raises the question of the ability of development agencies to find and employ basic needs strategies. The obligation to prevent severe human suffering leads to the obligation to employ basic needs strategies to attain basic needs goals. The history of failure by development agencies in finding and employing basic needs tools leads to a further obligation to cultivate bureaucratic environments which foster profound innovation. This (...) requires not only new tools but also new bureaucratic behaviour. An understandable obstacle to simultaneously technological and bureaucratic innovation lies in the tension between responsible behaviour and behaviour promoting fundamental change. Since this tension is based on the unpredictability of creative change, a series of axioms and corollaries which reduce the unpredictability is given. They include: (1) an obligation to seek innovation; (2) a clear statement of basic needs goals and intent to use some basic needs tools; (3) increase in effective knowledge of the poor and their survival strategies; (4) bureaucratic learning flexibility; (5) participatory development and allied emphasis on sustainable resource technologies. The embodiment of these in the learning process approach is illustrated. (shrink)