Organizations continue to show renewed focus on managing their ethics programs by developing organizational infrastructures to support their ethics implementation efforts. An important part of this process has been the creation of an ethics officer position. Whether individuals appointed to the position are successful in the role or not may depend on a number of factors. This study presents a suggested framework for their effectiveness. The framework includes a focus on personal, organizational and situational factors to predict performance in the (...) role. The study examines the complex nature of the role. These include task complexity, low task visibility, role conflict, and role ambiguity. Personal, organizational and situational factors that can serve as buffers against the complexities associated with the role are presented. The study suggests that individuals with certain competencies and orientations may be better suitable for the ethics position, and firms need to consider key organizational and situational issues critical to the performance of an ethics officer. The research and practice implications of the study are given. (shrink)

The article addresses issues at the nexus of physician industrial action, moral agency, and responsibility. There are situations in which we find ourselves best placed to offer aid to those who may be in vulnerable positions, a behavior that is consistent with our everyday moral intuitions. In both our interpersonal relationships and social life, we make frequent judgments about whether to praise or blame someone for their actions when we determine that they should have acted to help a vulnerable person. (...) While the average person is unlikely to confront these kinds of situations often, those in the medical professions, physicians especially, may confront these and similar situations regularly. Therefore, when physicians withhold their services for whatever reason in support of industrial action, it raises issues of moral responsibility to patients who may be in a vulnerable position. Using theories of moral responsibility, vulnerability, and ethics, this paper explores the moral implications of physician industrial action. We explore issues of vulnerability of patients, as well as the moral responsibility and moral agency of doctors to patients. Determining when a person is vulnerable, and when an individual becomes a moral agent, worthy of praise or blame for an act or non-action, is at the core of the framework. Notwithstanding the right of physicians to act in their self-interest, we argue that vulnerability leads to moral obligations, that physicians are moral agents, and the imperatives of their obligations to patients clear, even if limited by certain conditions. We suggest that both doctors and governments have a collective responsibility to prevent harm to patients and present the theoretical and practical implications of the paper. (shrink)

The outsourcing of medical research has become a strategic imperative in the global pharmaceutical industry. Spurred by the challenges of competition, the need for speed in drug development, and increasing domestic costs, pharmaceutical companies across the globe continue to outsource critical parts of their value chain activities, namely contract clinical research and drug testing, to sponsors across the globe, typically into emerging markets. While it is clear that important ethical issues arise with this practice, unraveling moral responsibility and the allocation (...) of responsibility is not so clear, considering that contracts, by their very definition transfer responsibility from the principal to the agent. This research provides a framework for exploring some of the ethical issues, including attributions of moral responsibility associated with Contract Medical Research. Using a theory of strategic and moral behavior, the research shows that both clients and sponsors in contract research have individual and collective responsibility to ensure that due care and diligence is exercised in the performance of clinical research. The research suggests some guidelines for stakeholder action. (shrink)

In his new book the eminent Kant scholar Henry Allison provides an innovative and comprehensive interpretation of Kant's concept of freedom. The author analyzes the concept and discusses the role it plays in Kant's moral philosophy and psychology. He also considers in full detail the critical literature on the subject from Kant's own time to the present day. In the first part Professor Allison argues that at the centre of the Critique of Pure Reason there is the foundation for (...) a coherent general theory of rational agency. The second part employs this account of rational agency as a key to understanding Kant's concept of moral agency and associated moral psychology. The third part focuses on Kant's attempt to ground both moral law and freedom in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason. This is a major contribution to the interpretation of Kant which will be of special interest to scholars and graduate students of Kant's moral theory. (shrink)

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the normativity (...) of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. (shrink)

Both an ideal entrée for beginning readers and a solid text for scholars, the second edition of Peter Kalkavage's acclaimed translation of Plato's _Timaeus_ brings enhanced accessibility to a rendering well known for its faithfulness to the original text. An extensive essay offers insights into the reading of the work, the nature of Platonic dialogue, and the cultural background of the _Timaeus_. Appendices on music, astronomy, and geometry provide additional guidance. A brief outline of the themes of the work, a (...) detailed glossary, and a selected bibliography are also included. (shrink)

cognitive, neuropsychological, and neurophysiological studies of both memory and consciousness. Before proceeding further, some discussion of terminology is necessary. It comes as no surprise to state that "consciousness" is one of the ...

Since 1992, Border Crossings has show cased Henry A. Giroux's extraordinary range as a thinker by bringing together a series of essays that refigure the relationship between post-modernism, feminism, cultural studies and critical pedagogy. With discussions of topics including the struggle over academic canon, the role of popular culture in the curriculum and the cultural war the New Right has waged on schools, Giroux identified the most pressing issues facing critical educators at the turn of the century. In this (...) revised edition, Giroux reflects on the limits and possibilities of border crossings in the 21st century. "Borders" in our post 9/11 world have not been collapsing, he argues, but vigorously rebuilt. In order to have a truly critically engaged citizenry the challenges of these new "borders"- such as the increased militarization of public spaces, the rise of neo-liberalism, and the war in Iraq- must play a vital role in any debate on school and pedagogy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Inspired by legal reasoning, this paper presents a semantics and proof theory of a system for defeasible argumentation. Arguments are expressed in a logic-programming language with both weak and strong negation, conflicts between arguments are decided with the help of priorities on the rules. An important feature of the system is that these priorities are not fixed, but are themselves defeasibly derived as conclusions within the system. Thus debates on the choice between conflicting arguments can also be modelled. The (...) semantics of the system is given with a fixpoint definition, while its proof theory is stated in dialectical style, where a proof takes the form of a dialogue between a proponent and an opponent of an argument: an argument is shown to be justified if the proponent can make the opponent run out of moves in whatever way the opponent attacks. (shrink)

This book is both a critique of the concept of the rights-holding, free, autonomous individual and attendant ideology dominant in the contemporary West, and an account of an alternative view, that of the role-bearing, interrelated responsible person of classical Confucianism, suitably modified for addressing the manifold problems of today.

Few if any philosophical schools have championed family values as persistently as the early Confucians, and a great deal can be learned by attending to what they had to say on the subject. In the Confucian tradition, human morality and the personal realization it inspires are grounded in the cultivation of family feeling. One may even go so far as to say that, for China, family reverence was a necessary condition for developing any of the other human qualities of excellence. (...) On the basis of the present translation of the Xiaojing (Classic of Family Reverence) and supplemental passages found in other early philosophical writings, Professors Rosemont and Ames articulate a specifically Confucian conception of "role ethics" that, in its emphasis on a relational conception of the person, is markedly different from most early and contemporary dominant Western moral theories. This Confucian role ethics takes as its inspiration the perceived necessity of family feeling as the entry point in the development of moral competence and as a guide to the religious life as well. In the lengthy introduction, two senior scholars offer their perspective on the historical, philosophical, and religious dimensions of the Xiaojing. Together with this introduction, a lexicon of key terms presents a context for the Xiaojing and provides guidelines for interpreting the text historically in China as well as suggesting its contemporary significance for all societies. The inclusion of the Chinese text adds yet another dimension to this important study. The Chinese Classic of Family Reverence is sure to appeal to specialists of comparative and Chinese philosophy and to all readers interested in the enduring importance of the family. (shrink)

This volume presents seventeen essays by one of the world's leading scholars on Kant. Henry E. Allison explores the nature of transcendental idealism, freedom of the will, and the concept of the purposiveness of nature. He places Kant's views in their historical context and explores their contemporary relevance to present day philosophers.

The notion that it is useful to specify norms progressively in order to resolve doubts about what to do, which I developed initially in a 1990 article, has been only partly assimilated by the bioethics literature. The thought is not just that it is helpful to work with relatively specific norms. It is more than that: specification can replace deductive subsumption and balancing. Here I argue against two versions of reliance on balancing that are prominent in recent bioethical discussions. Without (...) meaning to address the substance or the overall merits of either view I criticize, I attack Gert, Culver and Clouser's implicit reliance on some overall dimension of balancing as a basis of resolving conflicts among norms and Beauchamp and Childress's residual acceptance of 'justified balancing'. The former authors' description of resolving conflicts depends upon a type of value commensurability that (as they otherwise seem to admit) does not obtain, while the latter authors' role for justified balancing would be better served by continued specification. (shrink)

Moral reasoning is individual or collective practical reasoning about what, morally, one ought to do. Philosophical examination of moral reasoning faces both distinctive puzzles — about how we recognize moral considerations and cope with conflicts among them and about how they move us to act — and distinctive opportunities for gleaning insight about what we ought to do from how we reason about what we ought to do.

Recent work on incidental fndings, concentrating on the difcult problems posed by the ambiguous results often generated by high-tech medicine, has proceeded largely independently from recent work on medical researchers' ancillary-care obligations, the obligations that researchers have to deal with diseases or conditions besides the one(s) under study. This paper contends that the two topics are morally linked, and specifcally that a sound understanding of ancillary-care obligations will center them on incidental fndings. The paper sets out and defends an understanding (...) of ancillary-care obligations, which is based on the idea that when participants signed up for a study they may — independently of their beliefs and expectations and of those of the researchers — be taken to have partially entrusted certain aspects of their health into the researchers' hands. This partial-entrustment model of ancillary-care obligations, in turn, has substantive implications for how to deal ethically with incidental fndings; for instance, it suggests that researchers have no moral obligation to hunt for incidental fndings. (shrink)

This paper takes up Berman and Hafner's (1993) challenge to model legal case-based reasoning not just in terms of factual similarities and differences but also in terms of the values that are at stake. The formal framework of Prakken and Sartor (1998) is applied to examples of case-based reasoning involving values, and a method for formalising such examples is proposed. The method makes it possible to express that a case should be decided in a certain way because that advances certain (...) values. The method also supports the comparison of conflicting precedents in terms of values, and it supports debates on the relevance of distinctions in terms of values. (shrink)

This article presents a formal dialogue game for adjudication dialogues. Existing AI & law models of legal dialogues and argumentation-theoretic models of persuasion are extended with a neutral third party, to give a more realistic account of the adjudicator’s role in legal procedures. The main feature of the model is a division into an argumentation phase, where the adversaries plea their case and the adjudicator has a largely mediating role, and a decision phase, where the adjudicator decides the dispute on (...) the basis of the claims, arguments and evidence put forward in the argumentation phase. The model allows for explicit decisions on admissibility of evidence and burden of proof by the adjudicator in the argumentation phase. Adjudication is modelled as putting forward arguments, in particular undercutting and priority arguments, in the decision phase. The model reconciles logical aspects of burden of proof induced by the defeasible nature of arguments with dialogical aspects of burden of proof as something that can be allocated by explicit decisions on legal grounds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kant's Critique of Berkeley HENRY E. ALLISON THE CLAIMTHAT KANT'S IDEALISM,or at least certain strands of it, is essentially identical to that of Berkeley has a long and distinguished history. It was first voiced by several of Kant's contemporaries such as Mendelssohn, Herder, Hamann, Pistorius and Eberhard who attacked the alleged subjectivism of the Critique of Pure Reason. 1 This viewpoint found its sharpest contemporary expression in the (...) notorious Garve-Feder review to which Kant responded at length in the Prolegomena. In subsequent times it has been championed by Schopenhauer, and most nineteenth century German commentators on the relation between the two philosophers. 2 In addition, it has been, and continues to be, the prevailing view of the vast majority of British writers on Kant, including, with significant qualifications, Norman Kemp Smith. 3 This tradition continues despite the fact that Kant specifically, and in no uncertain terms, repudiated this identification in the Prolegomena and the second edition of the Critique. In both works he responds to the charges of subjectivism, and in so doing distinguishes his position from that of Berkeley, who in the eighteenth century was commonly regarded as a solipsist and denier of the "external world." 4 In contra-distinction to Kant's own critical or transcendental idealism, which explains the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge within the realm of possible experience, Berkeley is characterized as a "dogmatic" or "visionary idealist." He is judged guilty of "degrading bodies to mere illusion" (B69), of regarding things in space as "merely imaginary entities" (B274), and of holding with all "genuine idealists" that: "all knowledge through the senses and experience is i Cf. Hans Vaihinger, Commentar zu Kant's Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Stuttgart, Berlin, Leipzig, 1892), II, 494-505. Cf. Friederich Fredericks, Der Phainomenale Idealisraus Berkeley's und Kant's (Berlin, 1871); Robert Zimmerman, "Ober Kant's Widerlegung des Idealismus yon Berkeley" (Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, Philox.-hist. Kl.), LXVIII (1871); Gustav Dieckert, tiber dos Verhiiltnis des Berkeleyschen ldealismus zu Kantischen Vernun]tkritik (Konitz, 1888). Tiffs is a consequence of the general British tendency to view Kant in phenomenalist terms. A typical recent example is found in P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London, 1966). Kemp Smith in his Commentary to Kant's Critique o[ Pure Reason (2nd ed., rev., 1923) takes greaZ pains to distinguish between the subjectivist strand in Kant's thought, which is essentially identical to Berkeley's position, and the genuine critical doctrine which stands side by side with it in the text. 9 Cf. I-I.M. Bracken, The Early Reception of Berkeley's Materialism 1710-1733, rev. ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965). [43] 44 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY nothing but sheer illusion, and only in the ideas of pure understanding is there truth" (374). 5 One of the chief reasons for the continuation of the Kant-Berkeley tradition is that these, and similar statements about Berkeley, which we find in these works and in Kant's correspondenc e with Beck, have not been taken very seriously by Kant's critics. They are usually dismissed as obvious misinterpretations, due to Kant's ignorance of Berkeley's actual writings, and of his reliance upon distorted second and third hand accounts of Berkeley's thought such as is to be found in Beattie. Furthermore, this view is often supported by the philological reflection that Kant did not read English, and that Berkeley's writings were not yet available in German translation. 6 The philological argument, however, loses much of its force when we consider that there was indeed a German translation of Berkeley's Dialogues, which although apparently unknown to nineteenth century scholars, was readily accessible to Kant. This is to be found, together with a translation of Collier's Clavis Universalis and critical analyses, in a work by the professor of philosophy at Rostock, Johann Christian Eschenbach, entitled: Samlung der vornehmsten Schri[tsteller die die tFirklichkeit ihres eignen K~rpers und der ganzen Ki~rperwelt leugnen (Rostock, 1756). Furthermore, in addition to this work, which was probably known to Kant, there is Berkeley's important Latin work, De Motu (1721), as well as French translations of many of... (shrink)

In this paper we will analyse the issue of defeasibility in the law, taking into account research carried out in philosophy, artificial intelligence and legal theory. We will adopt a very general idea of legal defeasibility, in which we will include all different ways in which certain legal conclusions may need to be abandoned, though no mistake was made in deriving them. We will argue that defeasibility in the law involves three different aspects, which we will call inference‐based defeasibility, process‐based (...) defeasibility, and theory‐based defeasibility. Only the integration of these three perspectives allows us to provide a satisfactory account of the role of defeasibility in legal reasoning. (shrink)

In this volume Henry Corbin emphasizes the differences between the exoteric and esoteric forms of Islam. He also reveals that whereas in the West philosophy and religion were at odds, they were inseparably linked, at least during this period, in the Islamic world. A valuable section of notes and appendices includes original translation of numerous Sufi treatises.

This article presents the results of a study that analysed whether social responsibility had any bearing on the decision making of institutional investors. Being that institutional investors prefer socially aligned organizations, this study explored to what extent the corporate actions and/or social/environmental investments influenced their decisions. Our results suggest that there are specific variables that affect the perceived value of the organization, leading to decisions to not only invest, but whether to hold or sell the shares, and therefore having a (...) consequential impact on the capital market’s valuation. (shrink)

In his work on personal identity, Derek Parfit makes two revolutionary claims: firstly, that personal identity is not what matters in survival; and secondly, that what does matter is relation R. In this article I demonstrate his position here to be inconsistent, with the former claim being defensible only in case the latter is false. Parfit intends his famous fission argument to establish the unimportance of identity – a conclusion disputed by, among others, Mark Johnston. My approach is to critically (...) assess their debate, focusing on Johnston's reductio of Parfit's position. I contend that although Parfit's own response fails, there are other ways to save the fission argument. The unimportance of identity then comes at a cost, however, because the reductio can only be avoided by accepting either that nothing matters in survival, or else that facts about particles and forces do. Either way, relation R cannot be what matters. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Prugovečki offered a theory of simultaneous measurements based upon an axiomatic description of the measurement act which excludes certain illustrations of simultaneous measurement previously discussed by the present writers. In this article, the fundamental conceptions of state preparation, state determination, and measurement which underlie our research are compared to Prugovečki's interpretations of the analogous constructs in his theory of measurement.

This article investigates to what extent protocols for dynamicdisputes, i.e., disputes in which the information base can vary at differentstages, can be justified in terms of logics for defeasible argumentation. Firsta general framework is formulated for dialectical proof theories for suchlogics. Then this framework is adapted to serve as a framework for protocols fordynamic disputes, after which soundness and fairness properties are formulated for such protocols relative to dialectical proof theories. It then turns out that certaintypes of protocols that are (...) perfectly fine with a static information base, arenot sound or fair in a dynamic setting. Finally, a natural dynamic protocolis defined for which soundness and fairness can be established. (shrink)

Morain and Largent’s (2023) thorough and thoughtful article concludes that the partial-entrustment model of medical researchers’ ancillary-care obligations (Richardson and Belsky 2004; Belsky and R...

_Critical Models_ combines into a single volume two of Adorno's most important postwar works -- _Interventions: Nine Critical Models_ and _Catchwords: Critical Models II_. Written after his return to Germany in 1949, the articles, essays, and radio talks included in this volume speak to the pressing political, cultural, and philosophical concerns of the postwar era. The pieces in _Critical Models_ reflect the intellectually provocative as well as the practical Adorno as he addresses such issues as the dangers of ideological conformity, (...) the fragility of democracy, educational reform, the influence of television and radio, and the aftermath of fascism. This new edition includes an introduction by Lydia Goehr, a renowned scholar in philosophy, aesthetic theory, and musicology. Goehr illuminates Adorno's ideas as well as the intellectual, historical, and critical contexts that shaped his postwar thinking. (shrink)

Freedom of association and all institutions coming with it have not been accepted by the Chinese government. Instead, Chinese social organization administration is based upon the concept of association held by the Communist Party of China. The Chinese government had adopted a “total control” model of social organization administration in the era of totalitarianism before the “Opening-up and Reform”, leaving almost no room for social organizations to survive, because the CPC had regarded social organizations as “revolutionary” and “deconstructive”. The Chinese (...) has adopted a graduated control system to administrate social organizations in the era of authoritarianism after the “Opening-up and Reform”, treating social organizations differently according to their threats to the ruling order and their utilities for economic development, because the CPC has viewed social organizations as a “challenging” but “auxiliary” power. The on-going “innovation of registration and administration of social organizations” is not a return to international standard regarding social organization administration in China, but only partial reform of the graduate control system still based upon the CPC’s conception of association as “challenging” but “auxiliary”. Social organizations capable of providing public goods in areas of economic development and social services are given more favorable treatment by the government while political and religious organizations are still tightly controlled by the government. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus’s infamous An Essay on the Principle of Population was published. The publication of the Essay is best remembered for Malthus’s principle – that population multiplies geometrically as opposed to subsistence increasing arithmetically. What is not well known, however, is that Malthus’s Essay also offered a sophisticated – and heterodox – theory of mind. Despite a recent revival in Malthusian scholarship, Malthus’s theory of mind has been largely forgotten. The present study attempts to address this (...) neglected area within the literature, by evaluating Malthus’s contribution to the naturalization of the soul. I first situate Malthus’s theory of mind within the Essay’s broader naturalization project, examining Malthus’s role as naturalist; his views on humans as animals; and the Essay’s cosmology. This is followed by an exploration of the making and reception of the Essay, illustrating how readers widely interpreted Malthus’s theory of mind as a theory of naturalization. Finally, I reconstruct Malthus’s naturalized system of mind, discussing the mechanisms and dynamics involved in the operation of a materialist mind. In sum, I argue for the centrality of Malthus’s Essay in the larger naturalization movement, specifically as it pertains to the soul. (shrink)

This article develops a uniform interpretation of "pursuit for the sake of an end", explaining what an "unqualified final" end (sought solely for its own sake) offers that a (merely) final one does not and providing an improved account of what Aristotle means by an "ultimate end". This interpretation sheds light on (1) the regress argument at the outset of "N.E." I.2, (2) the way Aristotle argues for the existence of a highest good, (3) the special contribution of "self-sufficiency" (autarkeia) (...) within that good, and (4) the potential flexibility of Aristotle's view about the content of the highest good. (shrink)

In his Metrica, Hero provides four procedures for finding the area of a circular segment (with b the base of the segment and h its height): an Ancient method for when the segment is smaller than a semicircle, $$(b + h)/2 \, \cdot \, h$$ ( b + h ) / 2 · h ; a Revision, $$(b + h)/2 \, \cdot \, h + (b/2)^{2} /14$$ ( b + h ) / 2 · h + ( b / 2 (...) ) 2 / 14 ; a quasi-Archimedean method (said to be inspired by the quadrature of the parabola) for cases where b is more than triple h, $${\raise0.5ex\hbox{$\scriptstyle 4$} \kern-0.1em/\kern-0.15em \lower0.25ex\hbox{$\scriptstyle 3$}}(h \, \cdot \, b/2)$$ 4 / 3 ( h · b / 2 ) ; and a method of Subtraction using the Revised method, for when it is larger than a semicircle. He gives superficial arguments that the Ancient method presumes $$\pi = 3$$ π = 3 and the Revision, $$\pi = {\raise0.5ex\hbox{$\scriptstyle {22}$} \kern-0.1em/\kern-0.15em \lower0.25ex\hbox{$\scriptstyle 7$}}$$ π = 22 / 7. We are left with many questions. How ancient is the Ancient? Why did anyone think it worked? Why would anyone revise it in just this way? In addition, why did Hero think the Revised method did not work when $$b > 3\;h$$ b > 3 h? I show that a fifth century BCE Uruk tablet employs the Ancient method, but possibly with very strange consequences, and that a Ptolemaic Egyptian papyrus that checks this method by comparing the area of a circle calculated from the sum of a regular inscribed polygon and the areas of the segments on its sides as determined by the Ancient method with the area of the circle as calculated from its diameter correctly sees that the calculations do not quite gel in the case of a triangle but do in the case of a square. Both traditions probably could also calculate the area of a segment on an inscribed regular polygon by subtracting the area of the polygon from the area of the circle and dividing by the number of sides of the polygon. I then derive two theorems about pairs of segments, that the reviser of the Ancient method should have known, that explain each method, why they work when they do and do not when they do not, and which lead to a curious generalization of the Revised method. Hero’s comment is right, but not for the reasons he gives. I conclude with an exploration of Hero’s restrictions of the Revised method and Hero’s two alternative methods. (shrink)

Frances Kamm has for some time now been a foremost champion of non-consequentialist ethics. One of her most powerful non-consequentialist themes has been the idea of inviolability. Morality's prohibitions, she argues, confer on persons the status of inviolability. This thought helps articulate a rationale for moral prohibitions that will resist the protean threat posed by the consequentialist argument that anyone should surely be willing to violate a constraint if doing so will minimize the overall number of such violations. As Kamm (...) put it in a 1992 article, ‘If morality permitted minimizing violations of persons by violating other persons, then each of those saved as well as those persons used to save others would be less inviolable. It is the permission, not any actual violation of persons, that makes this so.’ Now, as thus baldly asserted, this claim borders on the conclusory. It is almost as if the claim were that morality conferred on persons the following status: that of being protected from consequentialism. One wants to hear in what inviolability consists, in more detail, so that we can understand it independently of the negation of consequentialism. And there is also an opposite problem: if inviolability is a good, then why can't consequentialism take it into account? Hence, one also wants to hear why this would not be the case. (shrink)

This paper develops and explores the idea of moral entanglements: the ways in which, through innocent transactions with others, we can unintendedly accrue special obligations to them. More particularly, the paper explains intimacy-based moral entanglements, to which we become liable by accepting another's waiver of privacy rights. Sometimes, having entered into others' private affairs for innocent or even helpful reasons, one discovers needs of theirs that then become the focus of special duties of care. The general duty to warn them (...) of their need cannot directly account for the full extent of these duties, but does indicate why a silent retreat is impermissible. The special duties of care importantly rest on a transfer of responsibilities that accompanies the privacy waivers. The result is a special obligation of beneficence that, while grounded in a voluntary transaction, was never voluntarily undertaken. Impartialist views of beneficence cannot capture the relevant phenomena well. (shrink)