In the wake of two recent high-profile, controversial cases involving the prosecution and conviction of Drs Bramhall and Bawa-Garba, this article considers when it is socially desirable to criminalise doctors’ behaviour, exploring how the matters of harm, public wrongs and the public interest can play out to justify—or not, as the case may be—the criminal law’s intervention. Dr Bramhall branded his initials on patients’ livers during transplant surgery, behaviour acknowledged not to have caused his patients any harm by way of (...) injury to their organs. Dr Bawa-Garba misdiagnosed and failed to properly assess a 6-year-old boy with pneumonia and sepsis under her care, who subsequently died. Taking account of contextual and public interest concerns, can and should there be exceptions to imposing criminal liability where a doctor’s behaviour is deemed grossly negligent and a significant contribution to a patient’s death? And is it really appropriate to subject a doctor to penal sanction where he may have committed a private wrong against a patient, but does not set back their interests? (shrink)

No law in any jurisdiction that permits physician assisted dying offers individuals a medically assisted death without the need to comply with certain criteria. The Netherlands is no exception. There is evidence to suggest that physicians are averse to providing an assisted death even when the Dutch ‘due care criteria’ have been met and the unbearable pain and suffering requirement is especially difficult to satisfy. Some individuals with an enduring desire to die who do not meet the ‘due care’ criteria (...) under the Dutch legislation turn to other means of achieving a self-appointed death. This paper explores two alternative methods of securing a self-determined death (an assisted death involving lay assistors or a self-hastened death by stopping eating and drinking), and raises the question of how far the law should recognise autonomy in the context of physician assisted death. (shrink)

Who should define what constitutes ethical and lawful medical practice? Judges? Doctors? Scientists? Or someone else entirely? This volume analyses how effectively criminal law operates as a forum for resolving ethical conflict in the delivery of health care. It addresses key questions such as: how does criminal law regulate controversial bioethical areas? What effect, positive or negative, does the use of criminal law have when regulating bioethical conflict? And can the law accommodate moral controversy? By exploring criminal law in theory (...) and in practice and examining the broad field of bioethics as opposed to the narrower terrain of medical ethics, it offers balanced arguments that will help readers form reasoned views on the ethical legitimacy of the invocation and use of criminal law to regulate medical and scientific practice and bioethical issues. (shrink)

This collection examines questions of medical accountability and ethics. It analyses how the criminal justice system regulates health care practice, and to what extent it is appropriate to use it as a tool to resolve ethical conflict in health care.

Who should define what constitutes ethical and lawful medical practice? Judges? Doctors? Scientists? Or someone else entirely? This volume analyses how effectively criminal law operates as a forum for resolving ethical conflict in the delivery of health care. It addresses key questions such as: how does criminal law regulate controversial bioethical areas? What effect, positive or negative, does the use of criminal law have when regulating bioethical conflict? And can the law accommodate moral controversy? By exploring criminal law in theory (...) and in practice and examining the broad field of bioethics as opposed to the narrower terrain of medical ethics, it offers balanced arguments that will help readers form reasoned views on the ethical legitimacy of the invocation and use of criminal law to regulate medical and scientific practice and bioethical issues. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that while individual private interests such as autonomy and the need for a medical procedure or treatment are important in the provision and delivery of health care and the utilization of biotechnologies, these concepts need to be balanced with other interests such that in certain situations they do not take priority. We use as an example a particular developing biotechnology, xenotransplantation, to suggest that interest in the health of the public is such that this biotechnology (...) should not be permitted to move to the clinical trial stage because of the particular risk of harm it poses to the potential xeno-recipient, their close contacts and the wider population. This is despite the interest of those in need of a transplant in allowing such clinical trials to proceed. We derive support for our position from John Stuart Mill's harm principle. (shrink)

summary, crtiques, strengths and limitation of the article.

Translator's Preface LA LOGIQUE DE HUSSERL, etude sur "Logique for- melle et logique transcendentale" the original of the present translation, was published ...

"In recent years, we have grown accustomed to philosophical language that is intensely self-conscious and rhetorically thick, often tragic in tone. It is enlivening to read Bergson, who exerts so little rhetorical pressure while exacting such a substantial effort of thought.... Bergson's texts teach the reader to let go of entrenched intellectual habits and to begin to think differently—to think in time.... Too much and too little have been said about Bergson. Too much, because of the various appropriations of his (...) thought. Too little, because the work itself has not been carefully studied in recent decades."—from Thinking in Time Henri Bergson, whose philosophical works emphasized motion, time, and change, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. His work remains influential, particularly in the realms of philosophy, cultural studies, and new media studies. In Thinking in Time, Suzanne Guerlac provides readers with the conceptual and contextual tools necessary for informed appreciation of Bergson's work. Guerlac's straightforward philosophical expositions of two Bergson texts, Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, focus on the notions of duration and memory—concepts that are central to the philosopher's work. Thinking in Time makes plain that it is well worth learning how to read Bergson effectively: his era and our own share important concerns. Bergson's insistence on the opposition between the automatic and the voluntary and his engagement with the notions of "the living," affect, and embodiment are especially germane to discussions of electronic culture. (shrink)

: This essay examines the increasing commodification of the body with respect to tissues, gametes, and embryos. Such commodification contributes to a diminishing sense of human personhood on an individual level, even as it erodes commitments to human flourishing at the societal level. After the case for social harm resulting from the increasing commodification of the body is made, the question becomes whether that harm is best remedied by following any of three approaches by which government traditionally seeks to promote (...) the flourishing of its citizens. The author concludes that it is not, and that what is needed is a pragmatic and somewhat casuistic approach to the regulation of contested commodities--that which legal scholar Margaret Jane Radin calls "incomplete commodification.". (shrink)

Discusses the ethical issues involved in the use of human embryonic stem cells in regenerative medicine.

Has exclusion of Darwin's views on evolution distorted 20c philosophy? Cunningham suggests a reappraisal.

Connects the work of Merleau-Ponty to environmental studies.

BackgroundExisting clinical ethics support (CES) instruments are considered useful. However, users report obstacles in using them in daily practice. Including end users and other stakeholders in developing CES instruments might help to overcome these limitations. This study describes the development process of a new ethics support instrument called CURA, a low-threshold four-step instrument focused on nurses and nurse assistants working in palliative care. MethodWe used a participatory development design. We worked together with stakeholders in a Community of Practice throughout the (...) study. Potential end users (nurses and nurse assistants in palliative care) used CURA in several pilots and provided us with feedback which we used to improve CURA.ResultsWe distinguished three phases in the development process. Phase one, Identifying Needs, focused on identifying stakeholder and end user needs and preferences, learning from existing CES instruments, their development and evaluation, and identify gaps. Phase two, Development, focused on designing, developing, refining and tailoring the instrument on the basis of iterative co-creation. Phase three, Dissemination, focused on implementation and dissemination. The instrument, CURA, is a four-step low-threshold instrument that fosters ethical reflection.ConclusionsParticipatory development is a valuable approach for developing clinical ethics support instruments. Collaborating with end users and other stakeholders in our development study has helped to meet the needs and preferences of end users, to come up with strategies to refine the instrument in order to enhance its feasibility, and to overcome reported limitations of existing clinical ethics instruments. (shrink)

_Philosophically explores the topic of emotional depth._.

The twelfth camel is a metaphor that has been used by authors such as Niklas Luhmann and Günter Teubner to demonstrate a version of the rationality of modern law. In this paper, François Ost exposes his own thoughts on the metaphor, and tries to go beyond paradoxes by providing twelve original readings, which in turn, give valuable insights for current debates about rationality, function and identity of legal systems. In sum, this paper is definitively an invitation to think about the (...) creativity that law requires for reaching social justice.Resumen:El duodécimo camello es una metáfora que ha sido utilizada por autores como Niklas Luhmann y Günter Teubner, para mostrar una versión de la racionalidad del sentido del derecho moderno. En esta entrega, François Ost propone una lectura que busca superar las paradojas, y nos ofrece doce versiones originales, cuyos contenidos nutren el debate sobre la racionalidad, función e identidad del sistema jurídico. En definitiva, el texto es una invitación a reflexionar sobre la creatividad que debe asumir el derecho para crear condiciones de justicia social. (shrink)

Some jurisdictions that have decriminalized assisted dying exclude psychiatric patients on the grounds that their condition cannot be determined to be irremediable, that they are vulnerable and in need of protection, or that they cannot be determined to be competent. We review each of these claims and find that none have been sufficiently well-supported to justify the differential treatment psychiatric patients experience with respect to assisted dying. We find bans on psychiatric patients’ access to this service amount to arbitrary discrimination. (...) Proponents of banning the practice ignore or overlook alternatives to their proposal, like an assisted dying regime with additional safeguards. Some authors have further criticized assisted dying for psychiatric patients by highlighting allegedly problematic practices in those countries which allow it. We address recent evidence from the Netherlands, showing that these problems are either misrepresented or have straightforward solutions. Even if one finds such evidence troubling despite our analysis, other jurisdictions need not adopt every feature of the Dutch system. (shrink)

Scientists and decision makers rely on climate models for predictions concerning future climate change. Traditionally, physical processes that are key to predicting extreme events are either directly represented or indirectly represented. Scientists are now replacing physically based parameterizations with neural networks that do not represent physical processes directly or indirectly. I analyze the epistemic implications of this method and argue that it undermines the reliability of model predictions. I attribute the widespread failure in neural network generalizability to the lack of (...) process representation. The representation of climate processes adds significant and irreducible value to the reliability of climate model predictions. (shrink)

Individuals are faced with the many opportunities to pirate. The decision to pirate or not may be related to an individual''s attitudes toward other ethical issues. A person''s ethical and moral predispositions and the judgments that they use to make decisions may be consistent across various ethical dilemmas and may indicate their likelihood to pirate software. This paper investigates the relationship between religion and a theoretical ethical decision making process that an individual uses when evaluating ethical or unethical situations. An (...) ethical decision making model was studied for general unethical scenarios and for the unethical behavior of software piracy. The research model was tested via path analysis using structural equation modeling and was found to be appropriate for the sample data. The results suggest that there is a relationship between religion and the stages of an ethical decision making process regarding general ethical situations and software piracy. (shrink)

ExcerptVictor Zaslavsky has written a moving and powerful short book that is less about the actual events of the horrendous crimes of Katyn than about the mechanisms that produced them and about the cover-ups—both inside the Soviet Union and in much of the rest of the world—that followed. The crimes themselves, which are still poorly known in the world outside of Poland, took place in March 1940, both in the Katyn forests in Russia and in other camps in the Soviet (...) Union where Polish prisoners were being held. The Soviets had taken the prisoners during and immediately after their invasion…. (shrink)

This article proposes a situated reading of maternal love, loss and lovelessness in Donna Hemans’ novel River Woman, locating her text in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. I argue that the complex affects that her representation of ‘child-shifting’ produces, can be articulated both in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her, and in the context of the plantation, where ruptured (...) ties at the level of community and culture continue to be reproduced in the personal, emotional and family spheres. I use the concept of marronage, developed in the work of Glissant and Depestre, to define strategies of survival that necessitated actual and imaginative flight or escape, to contextualise the complex affects of the plantation that are repeated and reproduced in the novel's present—the late twentieth-century Caribbean. (shrink)

Designed for a first course in the philosophy of mind, this book has several distinctive features.

What are the moral challenges that confront doctors as they manage healthcare institutions? How do we build trust in medical organisations? How do we conceptualize moral action? Based on accounts given by senior doctors from organisations throughout the UK, this book discusses the issues medical leaders find most troubling and identifies the moral tensions they face. Moral Leadership in Medicine examines in detail how doctors protect patients' interests, implement morally controversial change, manage colleagues in difficulty and rebuild trust after serious (...) medical harm. The book discusses how leaders develop moral narratives to make sense of these situations, how they behave while balancing conflicting moral goals and how they influence those around them to do the right thing in difficult circumstances. Based on empirical ethical analysis, this volume is essential reading for clinicians in leadership roles and students and academics in the fields of healthcare management, medical law and healthcare ethics"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)