Members of the Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs Standing Committee of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities present a collection of insights and recommendations developed from their collective experience, intended for those engaged in the work of healthcare ethics consultation.

A caregiver from the dominant U.S. culture and a patient from a very different culture can resolve cross‐cultural disputes about treatment, not by compromising important values, but by focusing on the patient's goals.

A limiting factor in ethics education in medical training has been difficulty in assessing competence in ethics. This study was conducted to test the concept that content analysis of pediatric residents’ personal reflections about ethics experiences can identify changes in ethical sensitivity and reasoning over time. Analysis of written narratives focused on two of our ethics curriculum’s goals: 1) To raise sensitivity to ethical issues in everyday clinical practice and 2) to enhance critical reflection on personal and professional values as (...) they affect patient care. Content analysis of written reflections was guided by a tool developed to identify and assess the level of ethical reasoning in eight domains determined to be important aspects of ethical competence. Based on the assessment of narratives written at two times (12 to 16 months/apart) during their training, residents showed significant progress in two specific domains: use of professional values, and use of personal values. Residents did not show decline in ethical reasoning in any domain. This study demonstrates that content analysis of personal narratives may provide a useful method for assessment of developing ethical sensitivity and reasoning. (shrink)

Treating patients and their family members with respect and dignity is a broadly accepted goal of health care. The work presented in this article is part of a larger project aimed at better understanding what constitutes treatment with respect and dignity in the ICU to improve the care that patients and family members receive in this regard. Direct observation was selected as one of the methods to facilitate this understanding because it provides the opportunity to see and document what actually (...) occurs during encounters among patients, their families, and clinicians. This article reports seven major thematic domains and many subthemes that together create a detailed account of the interpersonal and environmental components of treatment with respect and dignity. Attention to these components might enhance the experience and treatment of patients and family members. (shrink)

Respect and dignity are central to moral life, and have a particular importance in health care settings such as the intensive care unit (ICU). We conducted 15 semistructured interviews with 21 participants during an ICU admission to explore the definition of, and specific behaviors that demonstrate, respect and dignity during treatment in the ICU. We transcribed interviews and conducted thematic qualitative analysis. Seven themes emerged that focused on what it means to be treated with respect and/or dignity: treated as a (...) person; Golden Rule; acknowledgement; treated as family/friend; treated as an individual; treated as important/valuable; and treated as equal. Participants described particular behaviors or actions that were considered related to demonstrating treatment with respect and dignity: listening; honesty/giving information; attention to body/modesty/appearance; caring/bedside manner; patient and family as an information source; attention to pain; and responsiveness. These behaviors provide a framework for improving experiences with care in the ICU. (shrink)

Little is known about health care professionals’ perceptions regarding what it means to treat patients and families with respect and dignity in the intensive care unit (ICU) setting. To address this gap, we conducted nine focus groups with different types of health care professionals (attending physicians, residents/fellows, nurses, social workers, pastoral care, etc.) working in either a medical or surgical ICU within the same academic health system. We identified three major thematic domains, namely, intrapersonal (attitudes and beliefs), interpersonal (behaviors), and (...) system (contextual) factors that influence treatment with respect and dignity. Participants suggested strategies for improving treatment of patients and families in the ICU with respect and dignity, as well as the related need for enhancing respect among the multidisciplinary team of clinicians. Implementing these strategies will require innovative educational interventions and leadership. Future research should focus on the design and evaluation of such interventions on the quality of care. (shrink)

Despite wide recognition of the importance of treating patients with respect and dignity, little is known about what constitutes treatment in this regard. The intensive care unit (ICU) is a unique setting that can pose specific threats to treatment with respect and dignity owing to the critical state of patients, stress and anxiety amongst patients and their family members, and the highly technical nature of the environment. In attempt to understand various stakeholders’ perspectives of treatment with respect and dignity, patients (...) and family members were interviewed, a wide range of health care professionals participated in focus groups, and third party observers took field notes of interactions in the ICU. This paper compares and contrasts the data that were generated using these different methods. Triangulating the data in this way contributes to a more complete and nuanced understanding of treatment with respect and dignity in the ICU. (shrink)

Reductionism and holism, that is, antireductionism, are two of the prevailing paradigms within the philosophy of biology. Reductionists strive to understand biological phenomena by reducing them to a series of levels of complexity with each lower level forming the foundation for the subsequent level, by mapping such biological phenomena inasmuch as possible to the principal phenomena within the fundamental sciences of chemistry and physics. In this way, complex phenomena can be reduced to assemblages of more elementary explananda. Holism, in counterpart, (...) claims that there independently exist phenomena arising from ordered levels of complexity that have intrinsic causal power and cannot be reduced in this way. When dealing with the nature of biology and its unique foundations of essentialism, determinism and ethics, the pedagogical lens through which these foundations are conveyed to learners could provide a limited perspective if only the reductive approach is followed as it would not sensitise learners to the true complexity of the phenomenon of life and the study thereof, and it is the purpose of this article to frame the reductionist–antireductionist debate in order to illustrate this.Contribution: This article contributes new knowledge to the field of the philosophy of science; more specifically, the philosophy of biology by critically evaluating the pervasive dialectic between the theoretical frameworks of reductionism and antireductionism and alluding to the pedagogical consequences thereof. (shrink)

The deeply entrenched, sometimes heated conflict between the disability movement and the profession of bioethics is well known and well documented. Critiques of prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion are probably the most salient and most sophisticated of disability studies scholars’ engagements with bioethics, but there are many other topics over which disability activists and scholars have encountered the field of bioethics in an adversarial way, including health care rationing, growth-attenuation interventions, assisted reproduction technology, and physician-assisted suicide. The tension between the (...) analyses of the disabilities studies scholars and mainstream bioethics is not merely a conflict between two insular political groups, however; it is, rather, also an encounter between those who have experienced disability and those who have not. This paper explores that idea. I maintain that it is a mistake to think of this conflict as arising just from a difference in ideology or political commitments because it represents a much deeper difference—one rooted in variations in how human beings perceive and reason about moral problems. These are what I will refer to as variations of moral psychology. The lived experiences of disability produce variations in moral psychology that are at the heart of the moral conflict between the disability movement and mainstream bioethics. I will illustrate this point by exploring how the disability movement and mainstream bioethics come into conflict when perceiving and analyzing the moral problem of physician-assisted suicide via the lens of the principle of respect for autonomy. To reconcile its contemporary and historical conflict with the disability movement, the field of bioethics must engage with and fully consider the two groups’ differences in moral perception and reasoning, not just the explicit moral and political arguments of the disability movement. (shrink)

The deeply entrenched, sometimes heated conflict between the disability movement and the profession of bioethics is well known and well documented. Critiques of prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion are probably the most salient and most sophisticated of disability studies scholars’ engagements with bioethics, but there are many other topics over which disability activists and scholars have encountered the field of bioethics in an adversarial way, including health care rationing, growth-attenuation interventions, assisted reproduction technology, and physician-assisted suicide. -/- The tension between (...) the analyses of the disabilities studies scholars and mainstream bioethics is not merely a conflict between two insular political groups, however; it is, rather, also an encounter between those who have experienced disability and those who have not. This paper explores that idea. I maintain that it is a mistake to think of this conflict as arising just from a difference in ideology or political commitments because it represents a much deeper difference—one rooted in variations in how human beings perceive and reason about moral problems. These are what I will refer to as variations of moral psychology. The lived experiences of disability produce variations in moral psychology that are at the heart of the moral conflict between the disability movement and mainstream bioethics. I will illustrate this point by exploring how the disability movement and mainstream bioethics come into conflict when perceiving and analyzing the moral problem of physician-assisted suicide via the lens of the principle of respect for autonomy. To reconcile its contemporary and historical conflict with the disability movement, the field of bioethics must engage with and fully consider the two groups’ differences in moral perception and reasoning, not just the explicit moral and political arguments of the disability movement. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that medical professionals should protect a future child's rights by prohibiting disabled parents from using technology to deliberately have a disabled child because disability is taken as an inevitable, severe threat to a child's otherwise “open” future. I will first argue that the open future that allegedly protects a child's future autonomy is precluded by the very conditions needed to develop that future autonomy. Any child's future will be narrowed as they are socialized in a way (...) that gives them the capacity for autonomous choice. However, oppressive master narratives can diminish a future child's autonomy by distorting their narrative identity and constricting their agency. In fact, the open future argument does just this by advancing one of the most damaging master narratives about disability: that disability inevitably and severely restricts a person's autonomy and closes their future. (shrink)

It may seem obvious that causing disability in another person is morally problematic in a way that removing or preventing a disability is not. This suggests that there is a moral asymmetry between causing disability and causing non-disability. This chapter investigates whether there are any differences between these two types of actions that might explain the existence of a general moral asymmetry. After setting aside the possibility that having a disability is almost always bad or harmful for a person (a (...) view that we have critiqued at length elsewhere), seven putative differences are considered. Ultimately, it is concluded that none of these seven factors can ground a general moral asymmetry between causing disability and causing non-disability, though each factor can provide some moral reason to avoid causing disability in certain particular cases. (shrink)

Both mainstream and disability bioethics sometimes contend that the self-assessment of disabled people about their own well-being is distorted by adaptive preferences that are only held because other, better options are unavailable. I will argue that both of the most common ways of understanding adaptive preferences—the autonomy-based account and the well-being account—would reject blanket claims that disabled people’s QOL self-assessment has been distorted, whether those claims come from mainstream bioethicists or from disability bioethicists. However, rejecting these generalizations for a more (...) nuanced view still has dramatic implications for the status quo in both health policy and clinical ethics. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that, even when disability rights activists are most clearly acting as activists, they can advance the scholarly activity of disability bioethics. In particular, I will argue that even engaging in non-violent direct action, including civil disobedience, is an important way in which disability rights activists directly support the efforts of disability bioethics scholars. I will begin by drawing upon Hilde Lindemann’s work on relational narrative identity to describe how certain damaging master narratives about disability hinder (...) the uptake of arguments from disability bioethics. Then, I will argue that disability activism, especially non-violent direct action and civil disobedience, provides an effective counterstory to some of the worst of these master narratives, thereby laying the groundwork for the scholarly argument s of disability bioethicists to be given more serious consideration. Ultimately, I conclude that the field of bioethics is improved when it abandons the gross grained, generalizations about who disabled people are and how they act put forth by oppressive master narratives in favor of the more nuanced self-descriptions offered by the counterstories being offered by disabled people themselves. So it is that, by challenging these oppressive master narratives that constrain and distort the social meaning of disability, disability activism can improve mainstream bioethics. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 44-46.

In “Bioethics and the Moral Authority of Experience,” Nelson et al. explore what they refer to as “The Paradox of Experience.” The authors characterize this paradox formally as follows:(A) Personal...

False belief tasks have enjoyed a monopoly in the research on children’s development of a theory of mind. They have been granted this status because they promise to deliver an unambiguous assessment of children’s understanding of the representational nature of mental states. Their poor cousins, true belief tasks, have been relegated to occasional service as control tasks. That this is their only role has been due to the universal assumption that correct answers on true belief tasks are inherently ambiguous regarding (...) the level of the child’s understanding of mental states. It has also been due to the universal assumption that nothing in the child’s developing theory of mind would lead to systematically incorrect answers on true belief tasks. We review new findings that 4- and 5-year-olds do err, systematically and profoundly, on the true belief versions of all the extant belief tasks. This reveals an intermediate level of understanding in the development of children’s theory of mind. Researchers have been unaware of this intermediate level because it produces correct answers in false belief tasks. A simple two-task battery—one true belief task and one false belief task—is sufficient to remove the ambiguity from each task. The new findings show that children do not acquire an understanding of beliefs, and hence a representational theory of mind, until after 6 years of age, or 2 years later than most developmental psychologists have concluded. This raises the question of how to interpret other new findings that infants are able to pass false belief tasks. We review these new infant studies, as well as recent studies on chimpanzees, in light of older children’s failure on true belief tasks, and end with some speculation about how all of these new findings might be reconciled. (shrink)

Management Ethics: Integrity at Work redefines what it means for a manager to function with integrity in the private and public sectorsùdomestically and globally. It integrates the latest theoretical work in both descriptive and normative ethics, and incorporates legal, communication, quality, and organizational theories into a conceptual framework that improves managerial judgment in the handling of moral complexity at work. The authors use their organizational ethics consulting and academic research experience to provide practical assessment and decision-making tools that convert ethics (...) theories into sound action steps. The book examines three key dimensions of management integrityùjudgment, process, and developmental dimensionsùand applies them to individual chapters devoted to the subprocesses of ethical planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. The authors focus their theories and tools on 28 ethics minicases related to each management function in seven allied management application clusters: accounting, auditing management; finance, investment management; marketing, advertising management; business management, business law, human resource management; technology, quality operations, organizational behavior management; public, nonprofit, health care management; and international, environmental, public policy management. Management Ethics: Integrity at Work builds management integrity by linking and enhancing both ethics and management competence in responsible planning, organizing, leading, and controlling for use by professionals and students in the private and public sectorsùdomestically and globally. (shrink)

Disability activists have sometimes claimed their disability has actually increased their well-being. Some even say they would reject a cure to keep these gains. Yet, these same activists often simultaneously propose improvements to the quality and accessibility of assistive technology. However, for any argument favoring assistive over curative technology to work, there must be a coherent distinction between the two. This line is already vague and will become even less clear with the emergence of novel technologies. This paper asks and (...) tries to answer the question: what is it about the paradigmatic examples of curative and assistive technologies that make them paradigmatic and how can these defining features help us clarify the hard cases? This analysis will begin with an argument that, while the common views of this distinction adequately explain the paradigmatic cases, they fail to accurately pick out the relevant features of those technologies that make them paradigmatic and to provide adequate guidance for parsing the hard cases. Instead, it will be claimed that these categories of curative or assistive technologies are defined by the role the technologies play in establishing a person’s relational narrative identity as a member of one of two social groups: disabled people or non-disabled people. (shrink)

The authors identify the challenge of holding contemporary business leaders accountable for enhancing the intangible strategic asset of integrity capacity in organizations. After defining integrity capacity and framing it as part of a strategic resource model of sustainable global competitive advantage, the stakeholder costs of integrity capacity neglect are delineated. To address this neglect issue, the authors focus on the cultivation of judgment integrity to handle behavioral, moral and hypothesized economic complexities as key dimensions of integrity capacity. Finally, the authors (...) recommend two leadership practices to build competence in business leaders to enhance integrity capacity as an organizational strategic asset. (shrink)

Neuron diagrams are heavily employed in academic discussions of causation. Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, however, offer an alternative approach employing vector diagrams, which this paper attempts to develop further. I identify three ways in which dispositionalists have taken the activities of powers to be related: stimulation, mutual manifestation, and contribution combination. While Mumford and Anjum do provide resources for representing contribution combination, which might be sufficient for their particular brand of dispositionalism, I argue that those resources are not (...) flexible enough to further accommodate either stimulation or mutual manifestation. Representational tools are provided to address these limitations, improving the general value of the vector model for dispositionalist approaches to causation. (shrink)

In academic philosophy and popular culture alike, pity is often framed as a virtue or the emotional underpinnings of virtue. Yet, people who are the most marginalized and, hence, most often on the receiving end of pity, assert that it is anything but an altruism. How can we explain this disconnect between an understanding of pity as a virtuous emotion versus a social harm? My paper answers this question by showing how pity is not only an emotion, but also a (...) power relation. Using the ideas of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, I explain how pity is understood as harmful by the one pitied because he is acutely aware of how it obscures his unequal power relation to the pitier and denies the pitier’s role in creating this domination. This is all done with an eye toward what I see as the quintessential class of people who are harmed by pity: people with disabilities. (shrink)

This paper examines the need for static dispositions within the basic ontology of the powers view of properties. To lend some focus, Neil Williams’s well developed case for static dispositions is considered. While his arguments are not necessarily intended to address fundamental ontology, they still provide a useful starting point, a springboard for diving into the deeper metaphysical waters of the dispositionalist approach. Within that ontological context, this paper contends that Williams’s arguments fail to establish the need to posit static (...) dispositions, or at least any sort not already well appreciated by advocates of the powers view. The paper then proceeds to suggest an alternative motivation for positing static dispositions, the success of which depends greatly on which ontological approach to objects is paired with the powers view. (shrink)

The authors propose the integrity capacity construct with its four dimensions (process, judgment, development and system dimensions) as a framework for analyzing and resolving behavioral, moral and legal complexity in business ethics' issues at the individual and collective levels. They claim that moral progress in business comes about through the increase in stakeholders who regularly handle moral complexity by demonstrating process, judgment, developmental and system integrity capacity domestically and globally.

In taking properties to have powerful or dispositional essences, dispositionalism is primed to provide an account of causation. This paper lays out a challenge confronting the dispositionalist’s ability to account for how powers causally interact with one another so as to bring about collective results. The challenge, here labeled the “interaction gap,” is raised for two competing kinds of approaches to dispositional interaction: contribution combinationist and mutual manifestationist. After carefully highlighting and testing potential resources for closing the interaction gap, it (...) is concluded that the mutual manifestationist approach holds a significant advantage. In turn, the importance of the interaction gap itself is highlighted. While powers prime an ontology to yield an account of causation, how far that account can actually go depends on the metaphysical details of one’s view of powers and their causal interaction. (shrink)

In this paper, I make three arguments regarding Crisis Standards of Care developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, I argue against the consideration of third person quality of life judgments that deprioritize disabled or chronically ill people on a basis other than their survival, even if protocols use the language of health to justify maintaining the supposedly higher well-being of non-disabled people. Second, while it may be unavoidable that some disabled people are deprioritized by triage protocols that must consider the (...) likelihood that someone will survive intensive treatment, Crisis Standards of Care should not consider the amount or duration of treatment someone may need to survive. Finally, I argue that, rather than parsing who should be denied treatment to maximize lives saved, professional bioethicists should have put our energy into reducing the need for such choices at all by resisting the systemic injustices that drive the need for triage. (shrink)

In taking properties to have powerful or dispositional essences, dispositionalism is primed to provide an account of causation. This paper lays out a challenge confronting the dispositionalist’s ability to account for how powers causally interact with one another so as to bring about collective results. The challenge, here labeled the “interaction gap,” is raised for two competing kinds of approaches to dispositional interaction: contribution combinationist and mutual manifestationist. After carefully highlighting and testing potential resources for closing the interaction gap, it (...) is concluded that the mutual manifestationist approach holds a significant advantage. In turn, the importance of the interaction gap itself is highlighted. While powers prime an ontology to yield an account of causation, how far that account can actually go depends on the metaphysical details of one’s view of powers and their causal interaction. (shrink)

In his recent book, The Universe As We Find It, John Heil offers an updated account of his two-category ontology. One of his major goals is to avoid including relations in his basic ontology. While there can still be true claims positing relations, such as those of the form “x is taller than y” and “x causes y,” they will be true in virtue of substances and their monadic, non-relational properties. That is, Heil’s two-category ontology is deployed to provide non-relational (...) truthmakers for relational truths. This paper challenges the success of Heil’s project with respect to causation. The arguments here are not entirely negative, however. An option is made available to Heil’s ontology so that it might, at least to some extent, regain non-relational causings. (shrink)

Patients who are imminently dying sometimes experience symptoms refractory to traditional palliative interventions, and in rare cases, continuous sedation is offered. Samuel H. LiPuma, in a recent article in this Journal, argues that continuous sedation until death is equivalent to physician-assisted suicide/euthanasia based on a higher brain neocortical definition of death. We contest his position that continuous sedation involves killing and offer four objections to the equivalency thesis. First, sedation practices are proportional in a way that physician-assisted suicide/euthanasia is not. (...) Second, continuous sedation may not entirely abolish consciousness. Third, LiPuma’s particular version of higher brain neocortical death relies on an implausibly weak construal of irreversibility—a position that is especially problematic in the case of continuous sedation. Finally, we explain why continuous sedation until death is not functionally equivalent to neocortical death and, hence, physician-assisted suicide/euthanasia. Concluding remarks review the differences between these two end-of-life practices. (shrink)

Bracken synthesizes Polanyi’s notion of morphogentic field and Whitehead’s notion of societies of actual occasions. These comments emphasize the implications of the metaphors involved in these notions. The rnetaphor of plants growing in afield lies beyond the concept of a morphogenetic field, and the metaphor of a society of interacting persons lies behind the concept of a society of actual occasions. I suggest that one of the implications of this metaphor is that there is not, as Bracken argues, a problem (...) of continuity in Whitehead’s metaphysics of events. (shrink)

An introduction to the Yijing (I Ching) 易經 or Classic/Scripture of Change : its nature, its history of interpretation, and its cultural influences. New York: Oxford University Press (forthcoming).

The argument is that (1) the spiritual crisis that Zhu Xi discussed with Zhang Shi 張栻 (1133–1180) and the other “gentlemen of Hunan” from about 1167 to 1169, which was resolved by an understanding of what we might call the interpenetration of the mind’s stillness and activity (dong-jing 動靜) or equilibrium and harmony (zhong-he 中和), (2) led directly to his realization that Zhou Dunyi’s thought provided a cosmological basis for that resolution, and (3) this in turn led Zhu Xi to (...) understand (or construct) the meaning of taiji in terms of the polarity of yin and yang; i.e. the Supreme Polarity as the most fundamental ordering principle (li 理). (shrink)

It is a commonsense thesis that unactualized possibilities are not parts of actuality. To keep his modal realism in line with this thesis, David Lewis employed his indexical account of the term “actual.” I argue that the addition of counterpart theory to Lewis’s modal realism undermines his strategy for respecting the commonsense thesis. The case made here also reveals a problem for Lewis’s attempt to avoid haecceitism.

A bilingual translation of Zhu Xi's 朱熹 Yixue qimeng 易學啟蒙 (1186).

A translation of Zhu Xi's 朱熹 Zhouyi benyi 周易本義 (1188).

This dissertation is a study of the intersection of two monumental products and shapers of the Chinese tradition: the I-ching (Book of Change), which has influenced nearly all schools of Chinese thought for two millennia; and Chu Hsi (1130-1200), whose systematization of the Confucian tradition (known in the West as Neo-Confucianism) has dominated Chinese intellectual history until the present century. Focusing on Chu Hsi's theory of mind and his view of the ordinary person's need for concrete methods of self-cultivation, the (...) dissertation demonstrates how Chu Hsi's understanding of the I – its history, its contents, and it use in the practice of divination -- was fully integrated with his moral-metaphysics and his methodology of attaining Sagehood (the Neo-Confucian religious goal). In broader perspective, this is a study of the nature and limits of Confucian rationalism, the pragmatic character of Chinese philosophy, and the incorporation of a religious ritual (divination) into a philosophical system. Chapter I is an Introduction in two sections. The first is a survey of ancient Greek and modern theories of divination, establishing a comparative framework in which to analyze Chu Hsi's theory of divination. The second is a brief sketch of the two major schools of I-ching interpretation prior to Chu Hsi. Chapter II outlines the intellectual-historical context of Chu Hsi's approach to the I, concentrating on the complementary poles of his central problematic: cultural (the problem of the "transmission of the Way") and individual (the problem of mind). The "mind of the Sage" is discussed as a symbol of the unification of these poles. Chapter III is an examination of Chu's theory of I-ching interpretation, and the role of the mythic Sage Fu Hsi, who created the hexagrams and began the transmission of the Way, in Chu Hsi's system. Chapter IV concerns the practice of divination as a method of self-cultivation. It is proposed that Chu regarded I-ching divination – within certain limits -- as a method of detecting incipient changes in external events and in one's mind, thereby cultivating "moral responsiveness," or the ability to respond in a timely, intuitive, and correct way to change. Chapter V explores certain levels of symbolic meaning in the "philosophy of change" presupposed by hexagram divination. It is suggested that the human ability to transform oneself into a fully realized moral being, in responsive harmony with the natural world, is a Confucian way of grounding the self in the creative principle that constitutes the ontological foundation of the phenomenal world. (shrink)

It has become evident that mind–body supervenience, as merely specifying a covariance between mental and physical properties, is consistent with clearly non-physicalist views of the mental, such as emergentism. Consequently, there is a push in the physicalist camp for an ontologically more robust supervenience, a “superdupervenience,” that ensures that properties supervening on physical properties are physicalistically acceptable. Jessica Wilson claims that supervenience is made superduper by Condition on Causal Powers (CCP): each individual causal power associated with a supervenient property is (...) numerically identical with a causal power associated with its base property. Furthermore, according to Wilson, a wide variety of physicalist positions, both reductive and non-reductive, can be seen as relying on CCP to ensure that properties supervening on physical properties are physicalistically acceptable. I argue that imposing CCP on mind–body supervenience fails to ensure that mental properties are physicalistically acceptable. The problem, I contend, is that while CCP may guard against supervenient mental properties being insufficiently grounded in their physical bases it fails to guard against supervenient mental properties being too deeply grounded in their physical bases. (shrink)

The author identifies the major micro-, meso-, and macro-level financial risk shifting factors that contributed to the Great Global Recession and how the absence of a compelling moral vision of responsible financial risk management perpetuated the economic crisis and undermined the recovery by blind reliance upon insufficiently accountable bailouts. The author offers a new theoretical model of Sustainable Stakeholder Capitalism by exercising moral imagination which inclusively and moderately balances four multi-level factors: types of capitalism, moral theories, human nature drives, and (...) credit risk profiles. Finally, the author recommends micro-, meso-, and macro-level practical reforms to prevent a recurrence of the current economic freefall, to re-create systemic global financial institution integrity, and to promote responsible risk management for sustainable global prosperity for current and future generations. (shrink)