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Telecare is often regarded as a win/win solution to the growing problem of meeting the care needs of an ageing population. In this paper we call attention to some of the ways in which telecare is not a win/win solution but rather aggravates many of the long-standing ethical tensions that surround the care of the elderly. It may reduce the call on carers' time and energy by automating some aspects of care, particularly daily monitoring. This can release carers for other (...) caring activities. On the other hand, remote and impersonal monitoring seems to fall short of providing care. Monitoring may be used to help elderly users retain independence. But it may also increase the amount of information which flows from users to carers, which can result in a form of function-creep that actually undermines independence. (shrink)
In Europe, telecare is the use of remote monitoring technology to enable vulnerable people to live independently in their own homes. The technology includes electronic tags and sensors that transmit information about the user's location and patterns of behavior in the user's home to an external hub, where it can trigger an intervention in an emergency. Telecare users in the United Kingdom sometimes report their unease about being monitored by a ?Big Brother,? and the same kind of electronic tags that (...) alert telecare hubs to the movements of someone with dementia who is ?wandering? are worn by terrorist suspects who have been placed under house arrest. For these and other reasons, such as ordinary privacy concerns, telecare is sometimes regarded as an objectionable extension of a ?surveillance state.? In this article, we defend the use of telecare against the charge that it is Orwellian. In the United States, the conception of telecare primarily as telemedicine, and the fact that it is not typically a government responsibility, make a supposed connection with a surveillance state even more doubtful than in Europe. The main objection, we argue, to telecare is not its intrusiveness, but the danger of its deepening the isolation of those who use it. There are ways of organizing telecare so that the independence and privacy of users are enhanced, but personal isolation may be harder to address. As telecare is a means of reducing the cost of publicly provided social and health care, and the need to reduce public spending is growing, the correlative problem of isolation must be addressed alongside the goal of promoting independence. (shrink)
Principlism is the approach promoted by Beauchamp and Childress for addressing the ethics of medical practice. Instead of evaluating clinical decisions by means of full-scale theories from moral philosophy, Beauchamp and Childress refer people to four principles—of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Now it is one thing for principlism to be invoked in an academic literature dwelling on a stock topic of medical ethical writing: end-of-life decisions, for example. It is another when the topic lies further from the mainstream. In (...) such cases the cost of reaching for the familiar Beauchamp and Childress framework, with its formulaic set of concerns, may be to miss something morally important. After discussing an example of the sort of academic literature I have in mind, I propose to distinguish the uses of the formulaic from the uses of the more unapologetically theoretical in applied ethics, and to suggest that the latter can make up for some of the limitations of the former. This is not to say that the more theoretical literature has no limitations of its own, or that it should take the place of the formulaic. On the contrary, there is room in applied ethics and a use in applied ethics for both. But there is a sense in which there is a greater dependence of principlism on theory than the other way round, and at the end I try to spell out the significance of this fact. (shrink)
There is something intuitively correct about singling out emergency workers for legal protection, and for criminalizing not just assault, but obstruction. Moreover, at least one sophisticated theory of right and wrong â Scanlonâsâindicates some deep reasons for endorsing these intuitions. After applying Scanlonâs theory in the relevant way, I want to argue that the same grounds it provides for recent Scottish legislation and UK sentencing guidelines can also be given for punishing more seriously offences that current English law trivialises.
Philosophy written in English is overwhelmingly analytic philosophy, and the techniques and predilections of analytic philosophy are not only unhistorical but anti-historical, and hostile to textual commentary. Analytic usually aspires to a very high degree of clarity and precision of formulation and argument, and it often seeks to be informed by, and consistent with, current natural science. In an earlier era, analytic philosophy aimed at agreement with ordinary linguistic intuitions or common sense beliefs, or both. All (...) of these aspects of the subject sit uneasily with the use of historical texts for philosophical illumination. In this book, ten distinguished philosophers explore the tensions between, and the possibilities of reconciling, analytic philosophy and history of philosophy. Contributors: M. R. Ayers, John Cottingham, Daniel Garber, Gary Hatfield, Anthony Kenny, Steven Nadler, G. A. J. Rogers, Tom Sorell, Catherine Wilson, Yves Charles Zarka. (shrink)
Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau bring together original essays by the world's leading Hobbes scholars to discuss Hobbes's masterpiece after three and a half centuries. The contributors address three different themes. The first is the place of Leviathan within Hobbes's output as a political philosopher. What does Leviathan add to The Elements of Law (1640) and De Cive (1642; 1647)? What is the relation between the English Leviathan and the Latin version of the book (1668)? Does Leviathan deserve its pre-eminence? (...) The second theme concerns the connections between Hobbes's psychology and Hobbes's politics. The essays discuss Hobbes's curious views on the significance of laughter, evidence that he connected life in the state with passionlessness; the ways in which such things as fear for one's life entitle subjects to rebel; and the question of how the sovereign's personal passions are to be squared with his personifying a multitude. The third theme is Hobbes's views on the Bible and the Church: contributors examine the tensions between any allowance for ecclesiastical and (differently) biblical authority on the one hand, and political authority on the other. This is a book which anyone working on Hobbes or on this period of intellectual history will want to read. (shrink)
Agents sometimes feel free to resort to underhand or brutal measures in coping with an emergency. Because emergencies seem to relax moral inhibitions as well as carrying the risk of great loss of life or injury, it may seem morally urgent to prevent them or curtail them as far as possible. I discuss some cases of private emergency that go against this suggestion. Prevention seems morally urgent primarily in the case of public emergencies. But these are the responsibility of defensibly (...) partisan agents, and call for the exercise of powers that are legitimately hard to control. Philosophical standards for dealing with public emergency often ignore these facts, and are unduly moralistic as a result. (shrink)
Agents sometimes feel free to resort to underhand or brutal measures in coping with an emergency. Because emergencies seem to relax moral inhibitions as well as carrying the risk of great loss of life or injury, it may seem morally urgent to prevent them or curtail them as far as possible. I discuss some cases of private emergency that go against this suggestion. Prevention seems morally urgent primarily in the case of public emergencies. But these are the responsibility of defensibly (...) partisan agents, and call for the exercise of powers that are legitimately hard to control. Philosophical standards for dealing with public emergency often ignore these facts, and are unduly moralistic as a result. (shrink)
In a welfare states, no typical user of health care services isonly a patient; and no typical provider of these services is simply a doctor, nurse or paramedic. Occupiers of these rolesalso have distinctive relations and responsibilities â as citizensâ to medical services, responsibilities that are widely acknowledgedby those who live in welfare states. Outside welfare states, thisfusion of civic consciousness with involvement in health care isless pronounced or missing altogether. But the globalisation of avery comprehensive understanding of human rights, (...) including rightsto state-provided health care, will make welfare state thinking âfor better or worse â more of an orthodoxy worldwide than it isnow. Medical ethics needs to reflect this. (shrink)
No single text could be considered more important in the history of philosophy than Descartes' Meditations. This unique collection of background material to this magisterial philosophical text has been translated from the original French and Latin. The texts gathered here illustrate the kinds of principles, assumptions, and philosophical methods that were commonplace when Descartes was growing up. The selections are from: Francisco Sanches, Christopher Clavius, Pierre de la Ramee (Petrus Ramus), Francisco Suárez, Pierre Charron, Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, Scipion Dupleix, (...) Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, Jean de Silhon, François de la Mothe le Vayer, Charles Sorel, and Jean-Baptiste Morin. (shrink)
It was as a political thinker that Thomas Hobbes first came to prominence, and it is as a political theorist that he is most studied today. Yet the range of his writings extends well beyond morals and politics. Hobbes had distinctive views in metaphysics and epistemology, and wrote about such subjects as history, law, and religion. He also produced full-scale treatises in physics, optics, and geometry. All of these areas are covered in this Companion, most in considerable detail. The volume (...) also reflects the multidisciplinary nature of current Hobbes scholarship by drawing together perspectives that are now being developed in parallel by philosophers, historians of science and mathematics, intellectual historians, political scientists, and literary theorists. (shrink)
Consumers can sustain markets that are morally questionable. They can make immoral or morally suspect demands of individual businesses, especially small businesses. Even when they do not, the costs to firms of consumer protection can sometimes drive them to ruin. This paper presents cases where deference to the consumer is variously unwarranted, cases that may prompt second thoughts about some kinds of consumerism.
"Modern" philosophy in the West is said to have begun with Bacon and Descartes. Their methodological and metaphysical writings, in conjunction with the discoveries that marked the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, are supposed to have interred both Aristotelian and scholastic science and the philosophy that supported it. But did the new or "modern" philosophy effect a complete break with what preceded it? Were Bacon and Descartes untainted by scholastic influences? The theme of this book is that the new and traditional philosophies (...) have much more in common than the orthodox account suggests. The contributors consider not only modernity in metaphysics and the sciences but also the claims of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza to have invented "modern" ethics and politics. These two aspects of "modernity" in philosophy are connected for the first time. The book offers a broad view of the early modern philosophers, covering not only the much-studied major figures but also relatively neglected writers: Mersenne, Gassendi, White, and Sergeant. (shrink)
It is possible to defend the death penalty for aggravated murder in more than one way, and not every defence is equally compelling. The paper takes up arguments put forward by two very distinguished advocates of the death penalty, Mill and Kant. After reviewing Mill's argument and some weaknesses in it, I shall sketch another line of reasoning that combines his conclusion with premisses to be found in Kant. The hybrid argument provides at least the basis for a sound defence (...) of execution for the most serious murders. (shrink)
SCIENTISM AND 'SCIENTIFIC EMPIRICISM' WHAT IS SCIENTISM? Scientism is the belief that science, especially natural science, is much the most valuable part of ...
Rene Descartes had a remarkably short working life, yet his contribution to philosophy and physics have endured to this day. He is perhaps best known for his statement, "Cogito, ergo sum," the cornerstone of his metaphysics. Descartes did not intend the metaphysics to stand apart from his scientific work, which included important investigations into physics, mathematics, and optics. In this book, Sorell shows that Descarates was, above all, an advocate and practitioner of the new mathematical approach to physics, and that (...) he developed his philosophies to support his discoveries in the sciences. (shrink)
Rene Descartes had a remarkably short working life, yet his contribution to philosophy and physics have endured to this day. He is perhaps best known for his statement, "Cogito, ergo sum," the cornerstone of his metaphysics. Descartes did not intend the metaphysics to stand apart from his scientific work, which included important investigations into physics, mathematics, and optics. In this book, Sorell shows that Descarates was, above all, an advocate and practitioner of the new mathematical approach to physics, and that (...) he developed his philosophies to support his discoveries in the sciences. (shrink)
