Physicians generally recommend that patients resuscitated with naloxone after opioid overdose stay in the emergency department for a period of observation in order to prevent harm from delayed sequelae of opioid toxicity. Patients frequently refuse this period of observation despiteenefit to risk. Healthcare providers are thus confronted with the challenge of how best to protect the patient’s interests while also respecting autonomy, including assessing whether the patient is making an autonomous choice to refuse care. Previous studies have shown that physicians (...) have widely divergent approaches to navigating these conflicts. This paper reviews what is known about the effects of opioid use disorder on decision-making, and argues that some subset of these refusals are non-autonomous choices, even when patients appear to have decision making capacity. This conclusion has several implications for how physicians assess and respond to patients refusing medical recommendations after naloxone resuscitation. (shrink)

Corporate psychopathy thrives perhaps as the most significant threat to ethical corporate behaviour around the world. We argue that Human Resources Management professionals should formulate strategic solutions metaphorically by balancing what strategic military planners famously call ‘Search and Destroy’ and ‘Hearts and Minds’ counter-terrorist strategy. We argue that these military metaphors offer creative inspiration to help academics and practitioners theorise CP in richer, more reflective and more balanced and complementary ways. An appreciation of both metaphors is likely to favour the (...) use of hybrid strategies comprising SD and HM elements, which may provide the best HRM solutions to CP for the same reasons as the military now considers parallel hybrid solutions optimal for combating terrorist and guerrilla insurgency. (shrink)

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

The US FDA currently encourages the addition of vitamin D to milk and cereals, with the aim of reducing rickets in children and osteoporosis in adults. However, vitamin D not only regulates the expression of genes associated with calcium homeostasis, but also genes associated with cancers, autoimmune disease, and infection. It does this by controlling the activation of the vitamin D receptor (VDR), a type 1 nuclear receptor and DNA transcription factor. Molecular biology is rapidly coming to an understanding of (...) the multiplicity of roles played by the VDR, but clinical medicine is having difficulty keeping up with the pace of change. For example, the FDA recently proposed a rule change that will encourage high levels of vitamin D to be added to even more foods, so that the manufacturers can claim those foods “reduce the risk of osteoporosis”. The FDA docket does not review one single paper detailing the transcriptional activity of vitamin D, even though, on average, one new paper a day is being published on that topic. Nor do they review whether widespread supplementation with vitamin D, an immunomodulatory secosteroid, might predispose the population to immune dysfunction. This BioEssay explores how lifelong supplementation of the food chain with vitamin D might well be contributing to the current epidemics of obesity and chronic disease. BioEssays 30:173–182, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In The Quantum Self, Danah Zohar argues that the insights of modem physics can illuminate our understanding of everyday life -- our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the world at large. Guiding us through the strange and fascinating workings of the subatomic realm to create a new model of human consciousness, the author addresses enduring philosophical questions. Does the new physics provide a basis by which our consciousness might continue beyond death? How does the material world (for instance, (...) ugly inner cities) impinge upon our sense of self? Is there a subatomic wellspring from which our creativity, our empathy with others, and our feelings of unity with the inanimate world originate?Most important, Zohar shows how the vitality of the new physics combats the alienation and fragmentation of twentieth-century life, and replaces it with a model of reality in which the universe itself may possess a type of consciousness, of which human consciousness is one expression. (shrink)

Relatively congruence regular quasivarieties and quasivarieties of logic have noticeable similarities. The paper provides a unifying framework for them which extends the Blok-Pigozzi theory of elementarily algebraizable (and protoalgebraic) deductive systems. In this extension there are two parameters: a set of terms and a variable. When the former is empty or consists of theorems, the Blok-Pigozzi theory is recovered, and the variable is redundant. On the other hand, a class of membership logics is obtained when the variable is the only (...) element of the set of terms. For these systems the appropriate variant of equivalent algebraic semantics encompasses the relatively congruence regular quasivarieties. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Although prior work has shown that employees with ethical leaders are less likely to engage in deviant or unethical behaviors, it is unknown whetherallemployees respond this way or to the same extent. Drawing on social learning theory as a conceptual framework, this study develops and tests hypotheses suggesting that two follower characteristics—conscientiousness and core self-evaluation—moderate the negative relationship between ethical leadership and workplace incivility. Data from employees of a U.S. public school district supported our predictions. Implications and future research directions (...) are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:An Intervention into the Flew/Fogelin Debate Kenneth G. Ferguson Under an aggressive title, Robert FogeUn has recently undertaken to reveal "What Hume Actually Said About Miracles."1 He felt this necessary to correct whathe considers a serious misreading ofHume's essay "OfMiracles" (sec. 10 ofthe Enquiries2), a reading which infers that Hume did not argue thatmiracles are impossible a priori (Fogelin, 81). One writer at least regards this reading so common (...) that she has dubbed it the "traditional interpretation" of Hume's account of miracles.3 At any rate, it finds a strong advocate in Anthony Flew,4 against whom the majority ofFogelin's comments are directed. What I find fascinating about this debate is that both Flew and FogeUn appear to be right. On the one hand, Hume does have the textual resources to marshall a fully deductive argument against miracles, at least, once a strict definition of miracles is admitted. On the other hand, while exploiting these resources, Hume somewhat clumsily mingles in vestiges ofa not-fully consistent inductive argument against miracles which he bases on the balancing of probabilities. I will attempt to identify these two skeins ofargument, in the anticipation that this will help to temper the debate between Flew and Fogelin. Hume opens section 10by promisingan argument that will furnish "an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion" (E 110). Moreover, he claims that "there is here a direct and full proof... against the existence of any miracle" (E 115), a quote which Fogelin repeats seven times (toextractits full flavour). C. S. Peirce, wholate inlife took an interest in Hume's argument, conjectured that Hume hoped to provide a general disproof of all miracles that would not require "a minute analysis of each story"; such a procedure was in fact popular amongthe miracle debunkers ofHume's day, forexample, Rev. Thomas Woolston, whose books were extremely popular.5 Hume's boast of "a direct and full proof might be assumed, offhand, to augur an a priori argumentbased on the comparison ofideas; butitmust notbe forgotten that back in the Treatise (for which the essay "Of Miracles" was originally drafted6) Hume defines a "proof" as an argument "deriv'd from the relation of cause and effect."7 There he contrasts "proofs" explicitly with the type of assured knowledge that comes "from the comparison ofideas" (T 124). Still, Hume requires that proofs, despite their empirical origin, must nonetheless be "entirely free from doubt Volume XVII Number 2 105 KENNETH G. FERGUSON and uncertainty" (T 124); proofs, then, must be superior to ordinary causal arguments that are able to offer only a degree of probability (T 124). By his own examples, namely, that "the sun will rise to-morrow" and "all men must dye" (T 124), likewise from the essay "Of Miracles" itself, that "lead cannot, of itself, remain suspended in the air" and that "fire consumes wood" (E 114), Hume makes it clear that "proofs" are simply to be causal arguments uniformly confirmed by a great wealth of past experience: empirical conclusions so sound that any who deny them "wou'd appear ridiculous" (T 124). Taking Hume's definition of "proof" to heart, we might infer that his "direct and full proof against miracles is not then to be an a priori or deductive conclusion, but instead merely a fully convincing induction, along the Unes of"all men must dye." This,would appear to dispel Fogelin's hope to portray the argument as a priori; but the logic ofHume's special proofagainst miracles is somewhat complicated. As Hume's own selection of examples verify, a proof, at least ordinarily, issues in the confirmation of a law of nature. This contrasts with the special proof against miracles where the object is, of course, not to defend a law of nature, but rather to exploit reasoning about the formation of such laws to prove a result regarding the occurrence of miracles. The proof against miracles, consequently, concerns causes, but is not necessarily a causal argument in the ordinary sense. Indeed, it might be properly thought ofas a "meta-causal" argument, if such a term is allowed. And such an argument may potentially have, as Fogelin proposes, an a priori... (shrink)

The general concept of a causal system has been basic in scientific thought. It may be formulated as follows. The system in question possesses certain measurable attributes such as those of dimensions, temperature, and so forth. In the case of a causal system, it is affirmed that the subsequent development of the system from a known initial condition—that is, a condition in which the measurable variables have known values—is uniquely determined by these values. More definitely, the value of these same (...) variables after any interval of time depends only on the initial values of the variables and the time interval which has elapsed. (shrink)

MATERIALISTS claim that in principle mentality could be accounted for entirely by properties of matter. They must, of course, clarify, as far as possible, the precise scope of the concept "properties of matter." According to materialists there exists only one type of "substance" in the universe, namely matter. Sophisticated experimental and theoretical analyses have led contemporary physicists to interpret known material entities as being composed of two classes of elementary particles, namely quarks and leptons and constituents of interaction fields that (...) mediate interactions between some or all of the elementary particles and which comprise photons, gluons, intermediate bosons and gravitons. For instance, protons and neutrons are composed--by hypothesis--of quarks, while electrons are probably the most familiar leptons. Whether any analyzed and postulated elementary particles and constituents of interaction fields are "ultimate" components of matter can never be known. It remains always possible that more basic subcomponents of known components will be discovered. This has happened repeatedly throughout the history of physics. Hence, what physicists understand by the "physical properties" of the basic components of matter must always remain expressed in terms of usually intricate hypothetico-deductive theories which are tentative and fallible. Contemporary relativistic quantum mechanics of elementary particles and of interaction fields provide typical examples of such hypothetico-deductive theories relating to present known basic components of matter. (shrink)

SummaryExtremism in the environment‐versus innateness controversy in the behavioural sciences and in human sociobiology is being examined. Genetic effects can be severely modified or overruled by environmental factors, but may, nevertheless, be important. Dawkins' view that we are survival machines programmed to subserve selfish genes seems untenable and is a root of racialism. It is also argued that morality is compatible with mixed genetic and environmental control of brains via existing biological machinery.