Reviews the basic Catholic moral principles that apply to health care, then uses them to assess three major current trends in the health care industry.
The nanomedicine field is fast evolving toward complex, “active,” and interactive formulations. Like many emerging technologies, nanomedicine raises questions of how human subjects research (HSR) should be conducted and the adequacy of current oversight, as well as how to integrate concerns over occupational, bystander, and environmental exposures. The history of oversight for HSR investigating emerging technologies is a patchwork quilt without systematic justification of when ordinary oversight for HSR is enough versus when added oversight is warranted. Nanomedicine HSR provides an (...) occasion to think systematically about appropriate oversight, especially early in the evolution of a technology, when hazard and risk information may remain incomplete. This paper presents the consensus recommendations of a multidisciplinary, NIH-funded project group, to ensure a science-based and ethically informed approach to HSR issues in nanomedicine, and to integrate HSR analysis with analysis of occupational, bystander, and environmental concerns. We recommend creating two bodies, an interagency Human Subjects Research in Nanomedicine (HSR/N) Working Group and a Secretary's Advisory Committee on Nanomedicine (SAC/N). HSR/N and SAC/N should perform 3 primary functions: (1) analysis of the attributes and subsets of nanomedicine interventions that raise HSR challenges and current gaps in oversight; (2) providing advice to relevant agencies and institutional bodies on the HSR issues, as well as federal and federal-institutional coordination; and (3) gathering and analyzing information on HSR issues as they emerge in nanomedicine. HSR/N and SAC/N will create a home for HSR analysis and coordination in DHHS (the key agency for relevant HSR oversight), optimize federal and institutional approaches, and allow HSR review to evolve with greater knowledge about nanomedicine interventions and greater clarity about attributes of concern. (shrink)
This paper addresses a hitherto unexamined issue in the work of Michel Henry, namely, his critical interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s analysis of “appearing” and “speaking.” Throughout his distinguished career, Henry went to great philosophical lengths to distance himself from traditional phenomenology and from the work of Heidegger. However, for the most part, Henry’s critical reading of Heidegger has received little attention from phenomenologists and even that has been cursory. Hence, the central aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to show (...) that Henry’s critique of the “appearing” and “speaking” of the world remains unanswered; and (2) to show that a proper reading of Heidegger throws light on the shortcomings of Henry’s own project. Hence, because the second objective follows necessarily from having achieved the first, this paper submits that what is first needed is a re-assessment of Henry’s critique in light of a more accurate understanding of the depth-dimension of “appearing” and “speaking,” which is, I argue, evinced in the analysis of the voice of conscience in Being and Time. The paper subsequentlyoffers what I see as a more appropriate interpretation of the call of conscience in terms of a radicalised “transcendence in immanence” which is not reducible to the mere exteriority of inner-worldly beings. The paper concludes by arguing that the voice of conscience underscores the shortfalls of Henry’s critique of the “appearing” and “speaking” of the world in Heidegger. (shrink)
In his book A Theory of Sentience, Austen Clark argues that the content of sensory representations can be expressed as sentences constructed from a language of sentience. Such sentences specify that a determinate feature obtains in a particular space-time region, but the language's limited vocabulary prohibits the sentences from referring or attributing features to objects. In this paper, I show that this view is flawed in at least two ways. First, if sensation has the capacities that Clark and others attribute (...) to it, then the vocabulary of sense extends further than he supposes, and a limited language of sentience cannot justify a prohibition of object representation within sentience. Second, even if the language of sentience is as impoverished as he claims, and thus even if the representational capacity of sentience is correspondingly limited, object individuation can plausibly occur at the level of sensation. In the course of defusing Clark's major argument for an “object-less” theory of sentience, I offer reasons to believe both that sensory representations can be impressively sophisticated in what they say about the world, and that object representations can be surprisingly basic. (shrink)
Despite the similarities between Keane's approach (Keane, 1987) and ours (Ripoll, 1998), there are critical theoretical and empirical differences which are discussed.
