Abstract Context: Established in 1997, Summa Health System’s Medical Ethics Committee (EC) serves as an educational, supportive, and consultative resource to patients/families and providers, and serves to analyze, clarify, and ameliorate dilemmas in clinical care. In 2009 the EC conducted its 100th consult. In 2002 a Palliative Care Consult Service (PCCS) was established to provide supportive services for patients/families facing advanced illness; enhance clinical decision-making during crisis; and improve pain/symptom management. How these services affect one another has thus far been (...) unclear. Objectives: This study describes EC consults: types, reasons, recommendations and utilization, and investigates the impact the PCCS may have on EC consult requests or recommendations. Methods: Retrospective reviews of 100 EC records explored trends and changes in types of consults, reasons for consults, and EC recommendations and utilization. Results: There were 50 EC consults each in the 6 years pre- and post-PCCS. Differences found include: (1) a decrease in number of reasons for consult requests (133–62); (2) changes in top two reasons for EC consult requests from ‘Family opposed to withdrawing life-sustaining treatment (LST)’ and ‘Patient capacity in question’ to ‘Futility’ and ‘Physician opposed to providing LST’; (3) changes in top two recommendations given by the EC from ‘Emotional Support for Patient/Family’ and ‘Initiate DNR Order’ to ‘Comfort Care’ and ‘Withdraw Treatment.’ Overall, 88% of recommendations were followed. Conclusion: PCCS availability and growth throughout the hospital may have influenced EC consult requests. EC consults regarding family opposition to withdrawing LST and EC recommendations for patient/family support declined. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-16 DOI 10.1007/s10730-011-9170-9 Authors Jessica Richmond Moeller, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Akron General Medical Center, 400 Wabash Ave, Akron, OH 44307, USA Teresa H. Albanese, Health Services Research and Education Institute, Summa Health System and Northeast Ohio Medical University, 55 Arch St., Suite 1A, Akron, OH 44304, USA Kimberly Garchar, Kent State University, 6000 Frank Ave., N.W, North Canton, OH 44720, USA Julie M. Aultman, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Northeast Ohio Medical University, P.O. Box 95, Rootstown, OH 44272, USA Steven Radwany, Palliative Care and Hospice Services, Summa Health System and Northeast Ohio Medical University, 55 Arch St., Suite 1A, Akron, OH 44304, USA Dean Frate, Internal Medicine, Palliative Care and Hospice Services, Summa Health System and Northeast Ohio Medical University, 55 Arch St., Suite 1A, Akron, OH 44304, USA Journal HEC Forum Online ISSN 1572-8498 Print ISSN 0956-2737. (shrink)

Justice, equality, and righteousness—these are some of our greatest moral convictions. Yet in times of social conflict, morals can become rigid, making religious war, ethnic cleansing, and political purges possible. Morality, therefore, can be viewed as pathology-a rhetorical, psychological, and social tool that is used and abused as a weapon. An expert on Eastern philosophies and social systems theory, Hans-Georg Moeller questions the perceived goodness of morality and those who claim morality is inherently positive. Critiquing the ethical "fanaticism" of (...) Western moralists, such as Immanuel Kant, Lawrence Kohlberg, John Rawls, and the utilitarians, Moeller points to the absurd fundamentalisms and impracticable prescriptions arising from definitions of good. Instead he advances a theory of "moral foolishness," or moral asceticism, extracted from the "amoral" philosophers of East Asia and such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Niklas Luhmann. The moral fool doesn't understand why ethics are necessarily good, and he isn't convinced that the moral perspective is always positive. In this way he is like most people, and Moeller defends this foolishness against ethical pathologies that support the death penalty, just wars, and even Jerry Springer's crude moral theater. Comparing and contrasting the religious philosophies of Christianity, Daoism, and Zen Buddhism, Moeller presents a persuasive argument in favor of amorality. (shrink)

For centuries, the ancient Chinese philosophical text the _Daodejing (Tao Te Ching)_ has fascinated and frustrated its readers. While it offers a wealth of rich philosophical insights concerning the cultivation of one's body and attaining one's proper place within nature and the cosmos, its teachings and structure can be enigmatic and obscure. Hans-Georg Moeller presents a clear and coherent description and analysis of this vaguely understood Chinese classic. He explores the recurring images and ideas that shape the work and (...) offers a variety of useful approaches to understanding and appreciating this canonical text. Moeller expounds on the core philosophical issues addressed in the _Daodejing_, clarifying such crucial concepts as Yin and Yang and Dao and De. He explains its teachings on a variety of subjects, including sexuality, ethics, desire, cosmology, human nature, the emotions, time, death, and the death penalty. The _Daodejing_ also offers a distinctive ideal of social order and political leadership and presents a philosophy of war and peace. An illuminating exploration, The _Daodejing_ is an interesting foil to the philosophical outlook of Western humanism and contains surprising parallels between its teachings and nontraditional contemporary philosophies. (shrink)

Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) was a German sociologist and system theorist who wrote on law, economics, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love. Luhmann advocated a radical constructivism and antihumanism, or "grand theory," to explain society within a universal theoretical framework. Nevertheless, despite being an iconoclast, Luhmann is viewed as a political conservative. Hans-Georg Moeller challenges this legacy, repositioning Luhmann as an explosive thinker critical of Western humanism. Moeller focuses on Luhmann's shift from philosophy to theory, which introduced (...) new perspectives on the contemporary world. For centuries, the task of philosophy meant transforming contingency into necessity, in the sense that philosophy enabled an understanding of the necessity of everything that appeared contingent. Luhmann pursued the opposite--the transformation of necessity into contingency. Boldly breaking with the heritage of Western thought, Luhmann denied the central role of humans in social theory, particularly the possibility of autonomous agency. In this way, after Copernicus's cosmological, Darwin's biological, and Freud's psychological deconstructions of anthropocentrism, he added a sociological "fourth insult" to human vanity. A theoretical shift toward complex system-environment relations helped Luhmann "accidentally" solve one of Western philosophy's primary problems: mind-body dualism. By pulling communication into the mix, Luhmann rendered the Platonic dualist heritage obsolete. Moeller's clarity opens such formulations to general understanding and directly relates Luhmannian theory to contemporary social issues. He also captures for the first time a Luhmannian attitude toward society and life, defined through the cultivation of modesty, irony, and equanimity. (shrink)

Humans are moral creatures. Among all life on Earth, we alone experience rich moral emotions, follow complex rules governing how we treat one another, and engage in moral dialogue. But how did human morality evolve? And can humans become morally evolved? -/- In A Better Ape, Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell draw on the latest research in the biological and social sciences to explain the key role that morality has played in human evolution. They explore the moral traits that (...) humans share with chimpanzees; how a more complex moral mind enabled Homo sapiens to arise and out-compete other human species; and the place of morality alongside historic revolutions in technology and social organization. Throughout the book, Kumar and Campbell argue that morality co-evolved with intelligence and complex sociality. Morality prevents societal collapse and enables complex knowledge. -/- After unearthing the ancient origins of human morality, Kumar and Campbell use evolutionary theory to deliver profound insights about how to advance moral progress and resist moral regress, such as reducing animal suffering on industrial farms; capitalizing on the recent revolution in gay rights to foster a nascent revolution in transgender rights; opposing intersectional inequality that impacts women and people of color in lower socioeconomic classes; and addressing major problems of global inequality, especially impending crises of injustice caused by anthropogenic climate change. Understanding how we evolved--and how we continue to evolve--can help us become a better ape. (shrink)

RésuméL'ouvrage de Sophia Moreau, Faces of Inequality, adopte une méthodologie philosophique provocatrice. Moreau puise dans les expériences des victimes de discrimination et à même les contours fondamentaux du droit à la non-discrimination afin d’élaborer sa théorie de la discrimination répréhensible. Cependant, si nous prenons au sérieux les enseignements des études féministes et critiques de la « race », une tension émerge au sein de la dyade méthodologique de Moreau : si les lois contre la discrimination sont souvent elles-mêmes source d'hostilité (...) et d'invalidation pour les victimes de discrimination, comment ces expériences et ces lois peuvent-elles toutes deux faire autorité pour déterminer la nature de la discrimination répréhensible? Cet article explore cette tension à l’œuvre dans Faces of Inequality à la lumière de la théorie de la « conscience multiple » de Mari Matsuda. (shrink)

The World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on 11th March 2020, recognising that the underlying SARS-CoV-2 has caused the greatest global crisis since World War II. In this chapter, we present a framework to evaluate whether and to what extent the use of digital systems that track and/or trace potentially infected individuals is not only legal but also ethical.

Recently, a debate has developed between those who claim that essence can be explained in terms of de re modality (modalists), and those who claim that de re modality can be explained in terms of essence (essentialists). The aim of this paper is to suggest that we should reassess. It is assumed that either necessity is to be accounted for in terms of essence, or that essence is to be accounted for in terms of necessity. I will argue that we (...) should assume neither. I discuss what role these key notions – essence and necessity – can reasonably be thought to contribute to our understanding of the world, and argue that, given these roles, there is no good reason to think that we should give an account of one in terms of the other. I conclude: if we can adequately explain de re modality and essence at all, we should aim to do so separately. (shrink)

This chapter presents an overview of the issues that arise when logic is used in helping to understand problems in intelligent reasoning and to guide the design of mechanized reasoning systems. It provides some historical and technical details concerning nonmonotonic logic and reasoning about action and change, a topic that is not only central in artificial intelligence but that is normally of considerable interest to philosophers. The remaining sections provide brief sketches of selected topics, with references to the primary literature.

In this "for and against" book, ethicists Lori Watson and Jessica Flanigan debate the criminalization of sex work. Watson argues for a sex equality approach to prostitution in which buyers are criminalized and sellers are decriminalized, known as the Nordic Model. Flanigan argues that sex work should be fully decriminalized because decriminalization ensures respect for sex workers' and clients' rights, and is more effective than alternative policies.

'I know what you're thinking' is a fascinating exploration into the neuroscientific evidence on 'mind reading'.

We present a unified empirical and philosophical account of moral consistency reasoning, a distinctive form of moral reasoning that exposes inconsistencies among moral judgments about concrete cases. Judgments opposed in belief or in emotion and motivation are inconsistent when the cases are similar in morally relevant respects. Moral consistency reasoning, we argue, regularly shapes moral thought and feeling by coordinating two systems described in dual process models of moral cognition. Our empirical explanation of moral change fills a gap in the (...) empirical literature, making psychologically plausible a defensible new model of justified moral change and a hybrid theory of moral judgment. (shrink)

Drawing on recent work in formal pragmatic theory, this paper shows that the manipulation of discourse structure—in particular, by way of shifting the Question Under Discussion mid-discourse—can constitute an act of epistemic injustice. I argue that the “All Lives Matter” response to the “Black Lives Matter” slogan is one such case; this response shifts the Question Under Discussion governing the overarching discourse from Do Black lives matter? to Which lives matter? This manipulation of the discourse structure systematically obscures the intended (...) meaning of “Black lives matter” and disincentivizes future utterances of it. (shrink)

Assertion is a fundamental feature of language. This volume will be the place to look for anyone interested in current work on the topic.

O povo Kaingang é o mais populoso do Sul do Brasil e está entre os mais numerosos povos indígenas do país. Neste trabalho faz-se uma relação entre as informações encontradas na literatura e a atualidade na Terra Indígena Kaingang em relação ao conhecimento que possuem sobre o uso de plantas para a cura de doenças e como interpretam a ação da erva no organismo. Para isto, realizou-se uma pesquisa de campo em uma Terra Indígena Kaingang no Paraná, cujo entrevistas forneceram (...) confirmações históricas em relação aos etnoconhecimentos da etnia, da evolução dos aspectos químicos e das atitudes perante a química e os remédios de origem farmacêutica e natural. (shrink)

1 Background for the Uninitiated RICHMOND CAMPBELL Paradoxes are intrinsically fascinating. They are also distinctively ...

Modern epistemology has run into several paradoxes in its efforts to explain how knowledge acquisition can be both socially based and still able to determine objective facts about the world. In this important book, Richmond Campbell attempts to dispel some of these paradoxes, to show how they are ultimately just "illusions of paradox," by developing ideas central to two of the most promising currents in epistemology: feminist epistemology and naturalized epistemology. Campbell's aim is to construct a coherent theory of (...) knowing that is feminist and "naturalized." Illusions of Paradox will be valuable for students and scholars of epistemology and women's studies. (shrink)

Introduction : reading Nietzsche skeptically -- Nietzsche and the Pyrrhonian tradition -- Skepticism in Nietzsche's early work : the case of "on truth and lie" -- The question of Nietzsche's "naturalism" -- Perspectivism and Ephexis in interpretation -- Skepticism and health -- Skepticism as immoralism.

Shadow of the Other is a discussion of how the individual has two sorts of relationships with an "other"--other individuals. The first regards the other as a s work apart is her brilliant utilization of a systematic dialectical approach to her subject, always maintaining the delicate balance between opposing tensions: masculinity and femininity, subjectivity and objectivity, passivity and activity, love and aggression, fantasy and reality, modernism and postmodernism, the intrapsychic and the intersubjective. Benjamin s work apart is her brilliant utilization (...) of a systematic dialectical approach to her subject, always maintaining the delicate balance between opposing other as a mental repository fo unwanted characteristics cast from the self. Jessica benjamin shows the implications of this dual relationship for male/female hierarchy and offers a possibility for balancing the two. This book continues the author's well-known explorations of the themes of intersubjectivity and gender, taking up issues at the forefront of contemporary debates in feminist theory and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Recently, a debate has developed between those who claim that essence can be explained in terms of de re modality (modalists), and those who claim that de re modality can be explained in terms of essence (essentialists). The aim of this paper is to suggest that we should reassess. It is assumed that either necessity is to be accounted for in terms of essence, or that essence is to be accounted for in terms of necessity. I will argue that we (...) should assume neither. I discuss what role these key notions – essence and necessity – can reasonably be thought to contribute to our understanding of the world, and argue that, given these roles, there is no good reason to think that we should give an account of one in terms of the other. I conclude: if we can adequately explain de re modality and essence at all, we should aim to do so separately. (shrink)

This book brings together two experienced educators from the fields of teacher education and arts education. The authors Richmond, a photographer, and Snowber, a dancer and poet, see aesthetic education as aiming to extend creativity, appreciation of the arts and nature, and the sensuous qualities of everyday life, to gain a more intimate understanding of the self and the world. They include poetic, narrative, philosophical, and artistic ways of writing to support a more embodied and holistic aesthetics. Landscapes of (...) Aesthetic Education has significance for educators, scholars, students, and artists, and for all who would like to explore the connections between the arts, aesthetics, and transformation. (shrink)

When I see a tree through my window, that particular worldly tree is said to be ‘in’, ‘on’, or ‘before’ my mind. My ordinary visual link to it is ‘intentional’. How similar to this link are the links between me and particular worldly trees when I see them in photographs, or in paintings? Are they, in some important sense, links of the same kind? Or are they links of importantly different kinds? Or, as a third possibility, are they at once (...) links of the same important kind and also links of importantly different sub-kinds within that kind? This paper takes up these taxonomical questions. After fleshing out (a bit) the characterisation of these different subject-object links, I explain and expand upon an approach to answering the taxonomical questions originally set out by Kendall Walton. I then follow this approach a certain distance, connecting it with the question of how to mark the boundary between perception and cognition. My investigations support the conclusion that the three types of links just described are not importantly different in kind. (shrink)

A persuasive monograph that answers the keyepistemological arguments against anti-individualism in thephilosophy of mind.

How should physical entities be characterized? Physicalists, who have most to do with the notion, usually characterize the physical by reference to two components: 1. The physical entities are the entities treated by fundamental physics with the proviso that 2. Physical entities are not fundamentally mental (that is, do not individually possess or bestow mentality) Here I explore the extent to which the appeals to fundamental physics and to the NFM (“no fundamental mentality”) constraint are appropriate for characterizing the physical, (...) especially for purposes of formulating physicalism. Ultimately, I motivate and defend a version of an account incorporating both components: The physics-based NFM account: An entity existing at a world w is physical iff (i) it is treated, approximately accurately, by current or future (in the limit of inquiry, ideal) versions of fundamental physics at w, and (ii) it is not fundamentally mental (that is, does not individually either possess or bestow mentality). (shrink)

Knowledge ascriptions are a central topic of research in both philosophy and science. In this collection of new essays on knowledge ascriptions, world class philosophers offer novel approaches to this long standing topic.

Research groups around the world are currently busy trying to invent new life in the laboratory, looking for extraterrestrial life, or making machines increasingly more life-like. In the case of astrobiology, any newly discovered life would likely be very old, but when discovered it would be new to us. In the case of synthetic organic life or life-like machines, humans will have invented life that did not exist before. Together, these endeavors amount to what we call the emerging plurality of (...) lives because we see a future where we are surrounded by, and interact with, life of many different origins, as well as entities that we have not traditionally seen as being alive. In the future these entities will likely possess properties that we so far have only associated with living beings, thereby transcending and perhaps blurring the borders between life and non-life. (shrink)

Prison as a Torturous Institution Philosophers working on torture have largely failed to address the widespread use of torture in the U.S. prison system. Drawing on a victim-focused definition of torture, I argue that the U.S. prison system is a torturous institution in which direct torture occurs (the use of solitary confinement) and in which torture is allowed to occur through the toleration of sexual assault of inmates and the conditions of mass incarceration. The use and toleration of torture expresses (...) and reinforces the moral exclusion of those subjected to it, particularly African Americans. Importantly, this moral exclusion and the experience of torture may be created and reinforced through institutional practices independently of the intentions of individuals acting within those institutions. By prioritizing torture victims’ experiences and severing the link between torture and intention, my account forces a recognition that, far from being inconsistent with U.S. values, torture is deeply embedded within U.S. institutions. (shrink)

Imogen Dickie's book Fixing Reference promises to reframe the investigation of mental intentionality, or what makes thoughts be about particular things. Dickie focuses on beliefs, and argues that if we can show how our ordinary means of belief formation sustain a certain connection between what our beliefs are about and how they are justified, we will have explained the ability of these ordinary means of belief formation to generate beliefs that are about particular objects. A worry about Dickie's approach is (...) that the explanation it offers is circular and thus not a genuine explanation of mental aboutness. This article develops a version of that worry in detail and turns it aside. Nonetheless, I argue that the explanatory value of the account remains unclear. While it does promise a dialectical advance over traditional theorizing about aboutness, it does not reveal how our ordinary means of belief formation make beliefs be about what they are about. (shrink)

In Kitcher’s ‘pragmatic naturalism’ moral evolution consists in pragmatically motivated moral changes in response to practical difficulties in social life. No moral truths or facts exist that could serve as an ‘external’ measure for moral progress. We propose a psychologically realistic conception of moral objectivity consistent with this pragmatic naturalism yet alive to the familiar sense that moral progress has an objective basis that transcends convention and consensus in moral opinion, even when these are products of serious, extended and collaborative (...) reflection. (shrink)