The United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights engenders important state commitments to respect, fulfill, and protect a broad range of socio-economic rights. In 2010, a milestone was reached when the UN General Assembly recognized the human right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation. However, water plays an important role in realizing other human rights such as the right to food and livelihoods, and in realizing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. (...) These broader water-related rights have been recognized but have not yet been operationalized. This paper unravels these broader water-related rights in a more holistic interpretation of existing international human rights law. By focusing on an emerging approach to water services provision—known as ‘domestic-plus’ services—the paper argues how this approach operationalizes a comprehensive range of socio-economic rights in rural and peri-urban areas. Domestic-plus services provide water for domestic and productive uses around homesteads, which challenges the widespread practice in the public sector of planning and designing water infrastructure for a single-use. Evidence is presented to show that people in rural communities are already using their water supplies planned for domestic uses to support a wide range of productive activities. Domestic-plus services recognize and plan for these multiple-uses, while respecting the priority for clean and safe drinking water. The paper concludes that domestic-plus services operationalize the obligation to progressively fulfill a comprehensive range of indivisible socio-economic rights in rural and peri-urban areas. (shrink)

The salvation present in and through the person of Jesus is an organic motif of Luke's Gospel. It encompasses the offer of new life and the demand for disciplined living.

Drawing upon Aristotle’s claim that when one wants to learn right conduct or virtue, one should emulate those who practice it, this paper describes reasons for how the clear and conscious development of nursing role models can be used to model virtue theory in applied ethics courses. After providing a brief summary of Aristotle’s virtue ethics, the paper turns to a description of the basic models that describe the role of a nurse: surrogate mother, patient’s advocate, traditional caregiver, and trained (...) clinician. With these models in hand, the paper illustrates how virtues and duties can change when the role of the nurse changes and how different models of the nurse’s role connect virtue to practical action in different ways. Finally, the paper concludes with an extension of the above discussion to other areas of professional ethics and a step-by-step procedure for determining occupational duties. (shrink)

In an article titled, "Who Shall Live When Not All Can?", James Childress proposes a system for allocating scarce lifesaving medical resources based on random selection procedures. Childress writes of random selection procedures, [They] "cannot be dismissed as a ‘non-rational’ and ‘non-human’... without an inquiry into the reasons, including human values which might justify it." My thesis is that once we concentrate on determining the rationality of random selection procedures, we will see that Childress's claim that we cannot dismiss such (...) procedures as ‘non-rational’ is open to question. My claim will be that while both random selection and social worth procedures are rationally defensible systems, random selection procedures easily lead to specific choices that are objectively irrational, apart from the limited perspective of the random selection process itself. Keywords: allocation, random selection, rationality, rational decision-making, scarce resources, social worth CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This little textbook of 146 pages clarifies the basic concepts of ethics, introduces basic ethical principles, explains a strategy for ethical decision-making in difficult cases, and offers forty-five case descriptions for students to apply the RESOLVEDD strategy.

ETHICS ON THE JOB guides the reader through a step-by-step analysis to help them make good decisions in the face of ethical conflict. With the RESOLVEDD strategy, the authors have devised a powerful system for ethical decision-making in the workplace, which they teach students to implement through timely case studies and detailed analyses. Students develop a working grasp of important philosophical principles and their application in ethical conflicts, and learn to apply the RESOLVEDD strategy to ethical issues in their own (...) lives. A classic text in ethical decision-making, ETHICS ON THE JOB is widely used in business ethics classes and corporate training programs across the country. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version. (shrink)

This is a book for practical, ethical decision-makers. The first half of the book presents a strategy for making ethical decisions in the presence of a conflict of values. The main theories of ethics are presented, along with strategies for applying and evaluating their import. Two cases are described and analyzed in full, following the RESOLVEDD strategy. The second half presents detailed descriptions of 45 ethical conflicts that are found in contemporary workplaces, and that can be addressed using the RESOLVEDD (...) strategy. (shrink)

Antibodies that are specific for DNA provide an excellent system for studying the protein‐nucleic acid interactions that allow proteins to recognize specific DNA structures or sequences.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Psychiatric and neurological disorders have historically provided key insights into the structure-function rela- tionships that subserve human social cognition and behavior, informing the concept of the ‘social brain’. In this review, we take stock of the current status of this concept, retaining a focus on disorders that impact social behavior. We discuss how the social brain, social cognition, and social behavior are interdependent, and emphasize the important role of development and com- pensation. We suggest that the social brain, and its (...) dysfunction and recovery, must be understood not in terms of specific structures, but rather in terms of their interaction in large-scale networks. (shrink)

Here is a definition of knowledge: for you to know a proposition p is for you to have an outright belief in p that is correct precisely because it manifests the virtue of rationality. This definition resembles Ernest Sosa’s “virtue theory”, except that on this definition, the only virtue that must be manifested in all instances of knowledge is rationality, and no reductive account of rationality is attempted—rationality is assumed to be an irreducibly normative notion. This definition is compatible with (...) “internalism” about rationality, and with a form of “pragmatic encroachment” on the conditions of rational outright belief. An interpretation is given of this definition, and especially of the sense of ’because’ that it involves. On this interpretation, this definition entails that both safety and adherence are necessary conditions on knowledge; it supports a kind of contextualism about terms like ‘knowledge’; and it provides resources to defend safety, adherence, and contextualism, against some recent objections. (shrink)

This essay offers an account of the truth conditions of sentences involving deontic modals like ‘ought’, designed to capture the difference between objective and subjective kinds of ‘ought’ This account resembles the classical semantics for deontic logic: according to this account, these truths conditions involve a function from the world of evaluation to a domain of worlds (equivalent to a so-called “modal base”), and an ordering of the worlds in such domains; this ordering of the worlds itself arises from two (...) further elements – a probability function and a value function – since this ordering ranks the worlds in accordance with the expected value of certain propositions that are true at those worlds. Thus, a proposition of the form ‘Ought (p)’ is true at a world of evaluation w if and only if p is true at all the top-ranked worlds in the domain assigned to w. This domain of worlds consists of metaphysically possible worlds, while the probability function is defined over a space of epistemically possible worlds (which may include metaphysically impossible worlds, such as worlds where Hesperus is not Phosphorus). Evidence is given that this account assigns the correct truth conditions to a wide range of sentences involving ‘ought’. Since these truth conditions involve both a domain of metaphysically possible worlds and a space of epistemically possible worlds, there are two corresponding kinds of conditional involving ‘ought’, depending on which space of worlds is restricted by the conditional. Finally, some objections that might be raised against this account are answered. (shrink)

Psychologists' emerging interest in spirituality and religion as well as the relevance of each phenomenon to issues of psychological importance requires an understanding of the fundamental characteristics of each construct. On the basis of both historical considerations and a limited but growing empirical literature, we caution against viewing spirituality and religiousness as incompatible and suggest that the common tendency to polarize the terms simply as individual vs. institutional or ′good′ vs. ′bad′ is not fruitful for future research. Also cautioning against (...) the use of restrictive, narrow definitions or overly broad definitions that can rob either construct of its distinctive characteristics, we propose a set of criteria that recognizes the constructs' conceptual similarities and dissimilarities. Rather than trying to force new and likely unsuccessful definitions, we offer these criteria as benchmarks for judging the value of existing definitions. (shrink)