The need for professionals to volunteer their time in crisis situations and to reach across time and culture in the service of humanitarian interventions will likely not abate in the near future. This article provides readers with multiple venues for considering the ethical dimensions present in crisis and humanitarian interventions. Core ethical concerns common to helping situations are magnified in crisis work. In addition, issues unique to the nature of volunteer and crisis work must also be considered. Using hypothetical case (...) examples, bioethical principles, and ethical decision-making models, helping professionals are encouraged to go beyond their particular ethical codes in contemplating ethically and clinically sensitive volunteering. (shrink)

In this article, we examine conceptual and practical issues pertaining to relationship boundaries within the helping profession. Although our focus is primarily on relationships between mental health professionals and clients, there are considerable implications for a new approach to ethically structuring and understanding the construct of "required distance" in many human-interactive professions, such as teaching, religious leadership, public administration, and others. We define the concept of boundary as applied to human relationships, provide examples of boundary breaks, and raise questions regarding (...) how to evaluate the significance and morality issues raised by specific boundary breaks. Questions and dilemmas are presented regarding boundary setting and accidental or deliberate boundary breaking. Representative dangers present in boundary breaks are identified, and examples are provided. Possible beneficial outcomes are also discussed. Finally, a suggested protocol for assessing a proposed boundary break is provided, much of which is drawn from the work and thinking of Laura Brown, applied more generally in this article, with additions from our perspectives. (shrink)

Background: One of the ethical imperatives for a valid consent process in clinical medication trials is that the process be guided by and recorded in an informed consent document (ICD). Concerns have been expressed, however, about readability and participant understanding of ICDs, which are often 10–20 pages long. Objective measures of readability and understanding have been used to support these concerns in several articles, but surprisingly the voice of trial participants on ICDs has not been heard in previous studies. Hence, (...) this study compares participants' subjective views on readability and their understanding of ICDs with those ICDs' objective readability scores. It also evaluates whether family, friends, and additional aids would foster better understanding of the ICD. Methods: Sixty current trial participants rated the readability and their understanding of deidentified standard ICDs. These had been sourced from two multicenter international Phase III trials on medication for diabetes mellitus and cancer. Results: Less than 10% of participants considered the ICDs difficult to read or difficult to understand in spite of objective readability scores at levels of about 12th grade education, but about a quarter considered the ICDs to be too technical. Participants gave mixed responses about friends or family members helping or the need for videos, pictures, additional reading material, and frequently answered questions (FAQ) sheets as an aid to their understanding. Conclusions: These findings suggest individual clinical trial participants should be engaged on their views of an ICD, for doing so is part of informed consent as a process rather than consent being merely focused on written information. Such participant-specific engagement should guide whether family and friends, videos, pictures, additional reading material, and FAQ sheets would be of assistance in improving understanding. (shrink)

Argues that many corporate executives have destroyed the value of their companies, cheated stockholders, employees, and the public, and compromised the integrity of financial markets and accountants while enriching themselves.

Owen Flanagan argues in this book for a more psychologically realistic ethical reflection and spells out the ways in which psychology can enrich moral philosophy. Beginning with a discussion of such "moral saints" as Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Oskar Shindler, Flanagan charts a middle course between an ethics that is too realistic and socially parochial and one that is too idealistic, giving no weight to our natures.

Disagreement on law’s relationship to morality has long been driven by disagreement about our ordinary concept. Until recently, however, there had been no systematic investigation of lay intuitions. In this paper, we advance this nascent effort. Across two studies (N = 697), our findings reveal that most people consider law to be more than a matter of political circumstance alone. Contrary to the expectations of most contemporary philosophers, morality (both substantive and procedural) emerges as a key influence on judgments of (...) legal validity: many people say that conduct prohibited by immoral statutes is not truly illegal, and that immoral conduct which was never explicitly prohibited is truly illegal. This suggests that people often treat law as a dual character concept that, like the concepts of scientist or of artist, features autonomous concrete and abstract dimensions. (shrink)

Contemporary Western moral philosophy in harmony with classical Chinese philosophy, especially Buddhism.

Theories of moral desert focus only on the personal culpability of the agent to determine the amount of blame and punishment the agent deserves. I defend an alternative account of desert, one that does not focus only facts about offenders and their offenses. In this revised framework, personal culpability can do no more than set upper and lower limits for deserved blame and punishment. For more precise judgments within that spectrum, additional factors must be considered, factors that are independent of (...) the agent and the offense. I refer to this as the ‘partial conception’ of desert because takes facts about victims—their behavior, desires, and attitudes—into account for desert judgments. On my view, then, agents who are equally culpable may deserve different amounts of blame or punishment, depending on these victim-related factors. (shrink)

The doctor patient relationship starts with a story. Doctors' notes, a patient's chart, the recommendations of ethics committees and insurance justifications all hinge on written and verbal narrative interaction. The "practice" of narrative profoundly affects decision making, patient health and treatment and the everyday practice of medicine. In this edited collection, the contributors provide conceptual foundations, practical guidelines and theoretical considerations central to the practice of narrative ethics.

" -- "New Scientist" Intended for anyone attempting to find their way through the large and confusingly interwoven philosophical literature on consciousness, ..

An expansive look at how culture shapes our emotions—and how we can benefit, as individuals and a society, from less anger and more shame The world today is full of anger. Everywhere we look, we see values clashing and tempers rising, in ways that seem frenzied, aimless, and cruel. At the same time, we witness political leaders and others who lack any sense of shame, even as they display carelessness with the truth and the common good. In How to Do (...) Things with Emotions, Owen Flanagan explains that emotions are things we do, and he reminds us that those like anger and shame involve cultural norms and scripts. The ways we do these emotions offer no guarantee of emotionally or ethically balanced lives—but still we can control and change how such emotions are done. Flanagan makes a passionate case for tuning down anger and tuning up shame, and he observes how cultures around the world can show us how to perform these emotions better. Through comparative insights from anthropology, psychology, and cross-cultural philosophy, Flanagan reveals an incredible range in the expression of anger and shame across societies. He establishes that certain types of anger—such as those that lead to revenge or passing hurt on to others—are more destructive than we imagine. Certain forms of shame, on the other hand, can protect positive values, including courage, kindness, and honesty. Flanagan proposes that we should embrace shame as a uniquely socializing emotion, one that can promote moral progress where undisciplined anger cannot. How to Do Things with Emotions celebrates the plasticity of our emotional responses—and our freedom to recalibrate them in the pursuit of more fulfilling lives. (shrink)

Across two studies, a wide age range of participants was interviewed about the nature of death. All participants were living in rural Madagascar in a community where ancestral beliefs and practices are widespread. In Study 1, children (8–17 years) and adults (19–71 years) were asked whether bodily and mental processes continue after death. The death in question was presented in the context of a narrative that focused either on the corpse or on the ancestral practices associated with the afterlife. Participants (...) aged 8 years and older claimed that death brings an end to most bodily and mental processes. Nevertheless, particularly in the context of the religious narrative, they claimed that certain mental processes continue even after death. This assertion of an afterlife was more evident among adults than children, especially with respect to cognitive processes, such as knowing and remembering. In Study 2, 5‐ and 7‐year‐olds were asked similar questions in connection with the death of a bird and a person. Seven‐year‐olds consistently claimed that bodily and mental processes cease at death, whereas 5‐year‐olds were unsystematic in their replies. Together, the two studies replicate and extend findings obtained with Western children showing that, in the course of development, different conceptions of death are elaborated—a biological conception in which death terminates living processes and a religious conception in which death marks the beginning of a new form of spiritual existence. (shrink)

Human beings have the unique ability to consciously reflect on the nature of the self. But reflection has its costs. We can ask what the self is, but as David Hume pointed out, the self, once reflected upon, may be nowhere to be found. The favored view is that we are material beings living in the material world. But if so, a host of destabilizing questions surface. If persons are just a sophisticated sort of animal, then what sense is there (...) to the idea that we are free agents who control our own destinies? What makes the life of any animal, even one as sophisticated as Homo sapiens, worth anything? What place is there in a material world for God? And if there is no place for a God, then what hold can morality possibly have on us--why isn't everything allowed? Flanagan's collection of essays takes on these questions and more. He continues the old philosophical project of reconciling a scientific view of ourselves with a view of ourselves as agents of free will and meaning-makers. But to this project he brings the latest insights of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychiatry, exploring topics such as whether the conscious mind can be explained scientifically, whether dreams are self-expressive or just noise, the moral socialization of children, and the nature of psychological phenomena such as multiple personality disorder and false memory syndrome. What emerges from these explorations is a liberating vision which can make sense of the self, agency, character transformation, and the value and worth of human life. Flanagan concludes that nothing about a scientific view of persons must lead to nihilism. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to illuminate the ethically difficult situations experienced by care providers working in a nursing home. Individual interviews using a narrative approach were conducted. A phenomenological-hermeneutic method developed for researching life experience was applied in the analysis. The findings showed that care providers experience ethical challenges in their everyday work. The informants in this study found the balance between the ideal, autonomy and dignity to be a daily problem. They defined the culture they work in (...) as not supportive. They also thought they were not being seen and heard in situations where they disagree with the basic values of the organization. The results are discussed in terms of Habermas’s understanding of modern society. Care settings for elderly people obviously present ethical challenges, particularly in the case of those suffering from dementia. The care provider participants in this study expressed frustration and feelings of powerlessness. It is possible to understand their experiences in terms of Habermas’s theory of modern society and the concept of the system’s colonization of the life world. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine the philosophical sources of some of the criticisms made in the second half of the 20th century to the practices and the main assumptions of historiography. In particular, the influence of the writings by Nietzsche dedicated to European Historicism on the renewed concept of history which is imposed in the twentieth century from the thought of Heidegger and Foucault. The divergent concepts of historical time and existential temporality, as well as those of (...) narrative unity and continuity of historical events, are the concepts that mainly fall under the critical scrutiny of these thinkers. Archaeological investigations that Foucault devotes to institutions and procedures of the European past are mentioned as examples of the critical review of traditional historiography. (shrink)

Anthropology combines two quite different enterprises: the ethnographic study of particular people in particular places and the theorizing about the human species. As such, anthropology is part of cognitive science in that it contributes to the unitary theoretical aim of understanding and explaining the behavior of the animal species Homo sapiens. This article draws on our own research experience to illustrate that cooperation between anthropology and the other sub-disciplines of cognitive science is possible and fruitful, but it must proceed from (...) the recognition of anthropology’s unique epistemology and methodology. (shrink)

If our sense of the past is inevitably shaped by the explanatory logic of narrative, then the stories that we create in turn reveal the inescapable presence and ...

Consent governs innumerable everyday social interactions, including sex, medical exams, the use of property, and economic transactions. Yet little is known about how ordinary people reason about the validity of consent. Across the domains of sex, medicine, and police entry, Study 1 showed that when agents lack autonomous decision-making capacities, participants are less likely to view their consent as valid; however, failing to exercise this capacity and deciding in a nonautonomous way did not reduce consent judgments. Study 2 found that (...) specific and concrete incapacities reduced judgments of valid consent, but failing to exercise these specific capacities did not, even when the consenter makes an irrational and inauthentic decision. Finally, Study 3 showed that the effect of autonomy on judgments of valid consent carries important downstream consequences for moral reasoning about the rights and obligations of third parties, even when the consented-to action is morally wrong. Overall, these findings suggest that laypeople embrace a normative, domain-general concept of valid consent that depends consistently on the possession of autonomous capacities, but not on the exercise of these capacities. Autonomous decisions and autonomous capacities thus play divergent roles in moral reasoning about consent interactions: while the former appears relevant for assessing the wrongfulness of consented-to acts, the latter plays a role in whether consent is regarded as authoritative and therefore as transforming moral rights. (shrink)

abstract G. A. Cohen argues that egalitarians should compensate for expensive tastes or for the fact that they are expensive. Ronald Dworkin, by contrast, regards most expensive tastes as unworthy of compensation — only if a person disidentifies with his own such tastes (i.e. wishes he did not have them) is compensation appropriate. Dworkinians appeal, inter alia, to the so‐called ‘first‐person’ or ‘continuity’ test. According to the continuity test, an appropriate standard of interpersonal comparison reflects people's own assessment of their (...) relative standing: Person A can only legitimately demand compensation from person B if he regards himself as worse off, all things considered, than B. The typical bearer of expensive tastes does not regard herself as being worse off than others with less expensive tastes. Hence, in the typical case, pace Cohen, compensation for expensive tastes is inappropriate. The article scrutinizes this rationale for not compensating for expensive tastes. Especially, we try to bolster the continuity test by relating it to Dworkin's distinction between integrated and detached values, pointing out that an argument for the continuity test can be built on the assumption that equality has integrated value. In brief, the point is that a metric of equality should be assessed, partly, in virtue of its consequences for related ideals. One of these is the kind of justificatory community promoted by the continuity test. We defend this view against an objection to the effect that equality is a detached value. We conclude that the continuity test constitutes a strong foothold for the resourcist egalitarian reluctance to compensate people for their expensive tastes. (shrink)