While solid organ transplantation for patients with substance use issues has attracted ethical discussion, a typology of the ethics themes has not been articulated in the literature. We conducted a scoping review of peer-reviewed literature on solid organ transplantation and substance use published between January 1997 and April 2016. We aimed to identify and develop a typology of the main ethical themes discussed in this literature and to identify gaps worthy of future research. Seventy articles met inclusion criteria and underwent (...) inductive content analysis. Four main ethical themes were identified: (1) personal responsibility; (2) utility; (3) moral character; and (4) fairness. Each theme had multiple sub-themes and there was substantial overlap between themes. This scoping review identified a disproportionate emphasis in the literature regarding personal responsibility, which was referenced by each of the other themes, and a narrow focus on alcohol and liver. We recommend future research further investigate these connections between ethical themes and focus on ethical issues associated with transplants from organ groups other than liver for patients who use substances other than alcohol. (shrink)

Bioethics has received important criticisms for its perceived privileging of biomedical authority with longstanding calls for greater recognition of the social, political, economic, historical, and...

The digital age brings with it novel forms of data flow. As a result, individuals are constantly being monitored while consuming products, services and content. These abilities have given rise to a variety of concerns, which are most often framed using “privacy” and “data protection”-related paradigms. An important, oft-noted yet undertheorized concern is that these dynamics might facilitate the manipulation of subjects; a process in which firms strive to motivate and influence individuals to take specific steps and make particular decisions (...) in a manner considered to be socially unacceptable. That it is important and imperative to battle manipulation carries with it a strong intuitive appeal. Intuition, however, does not always indicate the existence of a sound justification or policy option. For that, a deeper analytic and academic discussion is called for. This Article begins by emphasizing the importance of addressing the manipulation-based argument, which derives from several crucial problems and flaws in the legal and policy setting currently striving to meet the challenges of the digital age. Next, the Article examines whether the manipulation-based concerns are sustainable, or are merely a visceral response to changing technologies which cannot be provided with substantial analytical backing. Here the Article details the reasons for striving to block manipulative conduct and, on the other hand, reasons why legal intervention should be, in the best case, limited. The Article concludes with some general implications of this discussion for the broader themes and future directions of privacy law, while trying to ascertain whether the rise of the manipulation-based discourse will lead to information privacy’s expansion or perhaps its demise. (shrink)

BackgroundIn Saudi clinical settings, benevolent family care that reflects strongly held sociocultural values is commonly used to justify overriding respect for patient autonomy. Because the welfare of individuals is commonly regarded as inseparable from the welfare of their family as a whole, these values are widely believed to obligate the family to protect the welfare of its members by, for example, giving the family authority over what healthcare practitioners disclose to patients about their diagnoses and prognoses and preventing them from (...) making informed decisions about their healthcare.DiscussionFamily dominance over the healthcare decisions of competent patients is ethically problematic when the family prevent healthcare practitioners from disclosing diagnoses and prognoses to patients who have the capacity to consent and make decisions in their own best interests. Thus, the author holds that sociocultural values ought to be respected only when they do not prevent competent patients from knowing their diagnoses and prognoses or prevent them from making their own decisions.ConclusionHealthcare practitioners should not allow patients’ families to control what can or cannot be disclosed to competent patients. This is particularly important when patients are approaching death so that they may address their material and spiritual wishes—among other needs—as they prepare for death. Justification for this position is drawn from the Maqasid Al-Shariah-based Islamic bioethics approach, from which it is possible to argue that the harm of withholding diagnoses and prognoses from patients who are imminently dying outweighs the potential benefits. (shrink)

Recent philosophical discussions construe disagreement as epistemically unsettling. On learning that a peer disagrees, it is said, you should suspend judgment, lower your credence, or dismiss your peer’s conviction as somehow flawed, even if you can neither identify the flaw nor explain why you think she is the party in error. Philosophers do none of these things. A distinctive feature of philosophy as currently practiced is that, although we marshal the strongest arguments we can devise, we do not expect others (...) to agree. Nor are we dismayed then they do not. Through a survey of familiar professional practices, I argue that philosophy rightly revels in responsible disagreement. This discloses important and perhaps surprising facets of the epistemology of philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, we report the results of a survey of North American adults (n= 1,215) conducted between March 24 and 30, 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Respondents completed the COVID-TIS (Transitional Impact Scale-Pandemic version) and the 21-item Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS), indicated their level of COVID-infection concern for themselves and close others, and provided demographic information. The results indicated: (a) during its early stage, the pandemic produced only moderate levels of material and psychological change; (...) (b) the pandemic produced mild to moderate levels of psychological distress; (c) respondents who lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic experienced more change and more psychological distress than those who did not, and (d) younger respondents and less well-educated ones experienced more psychological distress than older respondents. Unexpectedly, (e) respondents indicated that they were more concerned that friends and family members would become infected with COVID-19 than that they would be. We conclude by speculating that these results are driven less by the immediate changes brought about by the pandemic and more by uncertainty concerning its long-term economic and social impact. (shrink)

Social interactions at fraternities that undergraduate women identified as places where there is a high risk of rape are compared to those at fraternities identified as low risk as well as two local bars. Factors that contribute to rape are common on this campus; however, both men and women behaved differently in different settings. Implications of these findings are considered.

Religions, ideologies try to give a complete vision of the world a vision containing both its origin, explanation and a “normative kit”: a collection of precepts and rules, which should regulate human activities and behavior. Their synergetic meaning is clear: if embraced by all they allow for development of strong synergetic effects on the social macro scales. These in turn may lead to creation of order and beauty, of intellectual, spiritual and moral development within men and in society. In this (...) consist the elements of their natural—i.e. not explicitly reasoned out—wisdom. However, as they contain also some elements of harmful consequences—at least if they are literally accepted and in a fundamentalist manner practiced—they cannot be universally accepted. But—rejecting them we lose also the important sourcesof natural—or should we say instinctive—wisdom.Could the solution of this contradiction, of this one of the basic human sources of suffering be looked for in the modern science of complexity?Synergetics and the sciences of complex systems in general offer a solid scientific base for a meta-philosophical, universalist intellectual framework. Its offspring the social synergetics offers concrete propositions of optimized social structures. Optimized in the sense of espousing the main synergetic effects with being at the same time free of the negative “side effects” happening when religions or ideologies are the source of synergism.Finally a connection is discussed between the presented ideas and the concept of “love of wisdom”. The term “love of wisdom” may be understood as striving not only to possess a “sound and serene judgment regarding the conduct of life” but also a practical ability to act according to that judgment.This ability may be also expressed using the information-thermodynamic concepts of synergetics. Indeed without the ever continuing negentropy transformation neither survival of a complex system like man or society nor its continuing development—uncovering of all his “hidden potentials” is possible.To assure maximization of this transformation process creation of strong synergetic effects—of reinforcement, of positive feedback—between all human beings—i.e. not excluding any nations, any social groups, and any individuals—are necessary. Acting towards local and global realization of such a structure everywhere on our planet constitutes the essence of social wisdom.Removing all obstacles towards this goal—obstacles existing on the intellectual, emotional and spiritual level—should be one of the most important tasks of various institutions, of state structures, of purified from mythical elements ideologies, of man oriented sciences and above all of the modern universalism.Thus striving towards its realization is an expression of the love of wisdom. Of wisdom once based on the elements of mythos and now regained in the full light of Logos. (shrink)

Purpose. The aim of this article is an analysis of the main versions of the biodeterminist tradition of re­solving the issue of the nature of gender identity, as well as identification of the advantages of the new version of biodeterminism, which involves elements of social constructivism. Theoretical basis. Social norms determine the extent to which a person has the right to independently determine his or her gender identity, and even more so, to change his or her body according to such (...) gender concepts. Social norms regulate gender relations in society and direct the gender behavior of individuals. However, social norms do not create either the human body, or those biological laws, according to which it functions. Originality. The biodetermist theories of the gender were analyzed from the position of "week" social constructivism. The role of social norms as a factor of gender self-certification, as well as a factor of control over social interference in the functioning of human corporeality is considered. The role of modern medicine as an increasingly influential institutional means of control over the functioning of human corporeality, and therefore, indirectly, and for the implementation of gender identity self-identification is revealed. Conclusions. According to the "week" social constructivism the gender emerges as an integral result of biological, psychological and social construction. The role of personality in the design of the gender has historically grown, but this role can never exclude the influence of biological and social factors that are increasingly becoming the nature of biological and social technologies. Personality can become a victim of these technologies, but he/she can program them, or at any rate selectively use, combine, or to some extent adjust existing biological and social technologies. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan presented a paradigm of the social contract that has proven foundational in Western political thought. A proper understanding of the philosopher’s thought is thus of paramount importance. I argue that today’s case for a religiously tolerant Hobbes has missed an important part of the historical record. I first consider an obscure but important document, the second edition of the Humble Proposals. It demonstrates that leading members of a seventeenth century Christian denomination, the Independents, considered a state-enforced (...) confession of faith. Independents are generally seen as tolerant, and one of the arguments for Hobbesian toleration is that Hobbes endorsed them. But the second edition of the Humble Proposals aligns with the possibility in Hobbes that the civil sovereign will impose part III of Leviathan on the Universities and treat its contents as a legally required confession of faith – one that may be necessary for security, and the avoidance of civil war. Hobbes’s endorsement of Independency alone cannot be used to argue that his work leads to religious toleration. The evidence I present reinforces an earlier assessment and alongside other evidence points to the return of the intolerant Hobbes. (shrink)

There is a widely shared belief in contemporary epistemology that propositional knowledge is incompatible with certain kinds of luck, most of all with so called veritic luck. A subject is veritically lucky in his or her belief that p if this belief is true not due to its foundations (for example, reasons which an agent has to believe that p) but by mere accident. The acceptance of the thesis of incompatibility of knowledge with this kind of luck led to significant (...) modifications of a popular modern epistemological tripartite analysis of propositional knowledge according to which subject knows that p if and only if he or she believes that p is true, p is actually true, and an agent’s belief that p is true is justified. In his famous paper “Is True Justified Belief Knowledge” E. Gettier demonstrated that true justified belief may not be knowledge. The core of the problem is that in the cases described by Gettier and the like an agent’s belief, though justified, is true by accident. This gave rise to a set of theories introducing additional conditions of knowledge which could exclude veritic luck. In this paper the author critically discusses main modifications of the tripartite concept of knowledge aimed at making it independent on veritic luck, and show that they are unable to solve this problem. He agrees with those who think that the very thesis of incompatibility of knowledge with veritic luck is wrong. But he disagrees that all kinds of veritic luck are compatible with knowledge: the author supposes that good veritic luck is compatible with knowledge only when it compensates some negative effect of antecedent bad epistemic luck. According to this view original Gettier examples are not cases of knowledge whereas broken-clocks case and fake-barns case are. This account allows treating many classic cases of dependence of knowledge on luck as cases of knowledge-acquirement, but in the same time it excludes the inclusion into the class of knowledge such intuitively irrelevant outcomes as lucky guess and wishful thinking. (shrink)

This paper criticizes one of Vlastos’ well-known articles, in which he purports to reveal what he takes to be one of Socrates’ great achievements in ethics. By using what I take to be a more appropriate way of analysing Plato’s dialogues, I show how the same paragraph which is used by Vlastos to corroborate his case proves, in fact, the opposite. What Vlastos regards as “Socrates’ Rejection of Retaliation” turns out to be nothing but an instrument used by Socrates to (...) make Crito look at his own behavior towards the polis. In a wider context, Plato’s Crito is shown to be a severe criticism of democracy, where the lex talionis is rather one of its dominant tools used both by the state and its citizens. (shrink)

Civic education that prepares students for principled civic participation is vital to democracy. Schools face significant challenges, however, as they attempt to educate for democracy in a democracy in crisis. Parents, educators, and policy‐makers disagree about what America's civic future should look like, and hence about what schools should teach. Likewise, hyperpartisanship, mutual mistrust, and the breakdown of democratic norms are perverting the kinds of civic relationships and values that schools want to model and achieve. Nonetheless, there is strong evidence (...) that young people want to be civically engaged and are hungry for more and better civic learning opportunities. Reviving the civic mission of schools is thus a win‐win‐win. Adults want it, youth want it, and democracy needs it. We propose three means by which educators and the public can reconstruct our common purpose and achieve civic innovation to help democracy in crisis: support action civics, strengthen youth leadership outside the classroom, and engage both students and adults with “hard history” and contemporary controversies. (shrink)

Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s__ _The Madness of Vision_ is one of the most influential studies in phenomenological aesthetics of the baroque. Integrating the work of Merleau-Ponty with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Renaissance studies in optics, and twentieth-century mathematics, the author asserts the materiality of the body and world in her aesthetic theory. All vision is embodied vision, with the body and the emotions continually at play on the visual field. Thus vision, once considered a clear, uniform, and totalizing way of understanding the material world, (...) actually dazzles and distorts the perception of reality. In each of the nine essays that form _The Madness of Vision_ Buci-Glucksmann develops her theoretical argument via a study of a major painting, sculpture, or influential visual image—Arabic script, Bettini’s “The Eye of Cardinal Colonna,” Bernini’s _Saint Teresa_ and his 1661 fireworks display to celebrate the birth of the French dauphin, Caravaggio’s _Judith Beheading Holofernes,_ the Paris arcades, and Arnulf Rainer’s selfportrait, among others—and deftly crosses historical, national, and artistic boundaries to address Gracián’s_ El Criticón_; Monteverdi’s opera _Orfeo; _the poetry of Hafiz, John Donne, and Baudelaire; as well as baroque architecture and Anselm Kiefer’s Holocaust paintings. In doing so, Buci-Glucksmann makes the case for the pervasive influence of the baroque throughout history and the continuing importance of the baroque in contemporary arts. (shrink)