CQ: The Baby Bas Ross case stirred much public debate in The Netherlands since 1988 -a newborn infant with Down's syndrome whose parents refused to consent to a surgery that would have repaired an otherwise fatal congenital anomaly. Can you share your thoughts with us on this case?HD: I was the first ethicist to comment on this case because I was a friend of Dr. Molenaar, who was the final surgical decision maker for Baby Bas. A physician and I supported (...) his decision throughout the prosecution that followed. We also summarized the case in the N.T.V.G., the Dutch Magazine of Medicine. We argued In the article that parents should have the option to make nontreatment decisions. Moreover, In cases where the physician has to perform aggressive medical interventions, there certainly must be thorough and sound justification to ensure that the decision to Intervene Is in the best interest of the child.Heleen M. Dupuis, Ph.D., is Professor of Bioethics at the Leiden University School of Medicine, where she heads the Department of Metamedica and teaches in the Department of Philosophy. She is also a member of the Institutional Review Board/Ethics Committee of the Leiden University Hospital and a member of the Ethics Committee of the Royal Dutch Society of Medicine. (shrink)

Ethicists differ considerably in their reasons for using empirical data. This paper presents a brief overview of four traditional approaches to the use of empirical data: “the prescriptive applied ethicists,” “the theorists,” “the critical applied ethicists,” and “the particularists.” The main aim of this paper is to introduce a fifth approach of more recent date (i.e. “integrated empirical ethics”) and to offer some methodological directives for research in integrated empirical ethics. All five approaches are presented in a table for heuristic (...) purposes. The table consists of eight columns: “view on distinction descriptive-prescriptive sciences,” “location of moral authority,” “central goal(s),” “types of normativity,” “use of empirical data,” “method,” “interaction empirical data and moral theory,” and “cooperation with descriptive sciences.” Ethicists can use the table in order to identify their own approach. Reflection on these issues prior to starting research in empirical ethics should lead to harmonization of the different scientific disciplines and effective planning of the final research design. Integrated empirical ethics (IEE) refers to studies in which ethicists and descriptive scientists cooperate together continuously and intensively. Both disciplines try to integrate moral theory and empirical data in order to reach a normative conclusion with respect to a specific social practice. IEE is not wholly prescriptive or wholly descriptive since IEE assumes an interdepence between facts and values and between the empirical and the normative. The paper ends with three suggestions for consideration on some of the future challenges of integrated empirical ethics. (shrink)

In this article the various descriptions and interpretations ofprofessional autonomy, as have been given in the articles from Belgium,Italy and the UK are subjected to a further analysis. The implicit claimthat professional autonomy of physicians is beneficial for the health ofpatients is scrutinized and is proven to be untrue and invalid. Theconclusion is that professional autonomy is more directed at theinterests of physicians than of those of patients and deserves nospecial place in health care.

This volume addresses the recent concern over the state of education in the U.S. today by tracing the history of educational theory from its classical roots to the reforms recommended by early and later liberals.

This paper challenges the traditional assumption that descriptive and prescriptive sciences are essentially distinct by presenting a study on the implicit normativity of the production and presentation of biomedical scientific facts within evidence-based medicine. This interdisciplinary study serves as an illustration of the potential worth of the concept of implicit normativity for bioethics in general and for integrated empirical ethics research in particular. It demonstrates how both the production and presentation of scientific information in an evidence-based decision-support contain implicit presuppositions (...) and values, which pre-structure the moral environment of the clinical process of decision-making. As a consequence, the evidence-based decision support did not only support the clinical decision-making process; it also transformed it in a morally significant way. This phenomenon undermines the assumption within much of the literature on patient autonomy that information disclosure is a conditional requirement before patient autonomy even starts; patient autonomy is already influenced during the production and presentation of information. These results imply an increased responsibility of those who produce and present evidence-based facts(i.e. scientists in general and physicians in particular). The insights of this study not only involve a different focus on both theory and practice of patient autonomy and informed consent, but they also call for a broader scope of morality than does traditional empirical research in bioethics. The concept of implicit normativity within integrated empirical ethics research calls for a strong cooperation between bioethicists and descriptive scientists, i.e., a cooperation that goes beyond the discipline-specific epistemic values and that takes place during all phases of the research process. (shrink)

The study of anarchism as a philosophical, political, and social movement has burgeoned both in the academy and in the global activist community in recent years. Taking advantage of this boom in anarchist scholarship, Nathan J. Jun and Shane Wahl have compiled twenty-six cutting-edge essays on this timely topic in New Perspectives on Anarchism.

De nos jours existe un extraordinaire engouement pour les sciences du cerveau qui captivent de plus en plus de penseurs. Des philosophes americains encouragent leurs pairs a s'initier aux neurosciences. Des hommes de science, conscients des enjeux metaphysiques inherents a leur domaine, invitent les philosophes a decouvrir les faits nouveaux apportes par les decouvertes sur le systeme nerveux. Il parait donc legitime que le philosophe soit concerne par les developpements recents des sciences du cerveau. Par la diversite des points de (...) vus et des perspectives, le present recueil souhaite contribuer a eclairer, dans la mesure du possible, quelques-unes des questions inherentes aux interactions entre la philosophie et les neurosciences. (shrink)

Six études mettent en lumière l'importance de la significativité dans l'existence, en particulier de nos jours, au coeur d'une société postmoderne désenchantée, à la fois en recherche de sens et saturée d'indications en tous genres. Sont appelés à en témoigner des penseurs - de Heidegger à Blumenberg, en passant par Levinas et Winnicott -, mais aussi le champ de l'éthique des soins et la Daseinsanalyse de Binswanger."--Page 4 of cover.

Corporate misconduct receives significant attention in the business ethics literature. This paper studies how corporate misconduct is impacted by import penetration from China, which is largely exogenous to the U.S. product market. Using this natural experiment, we find that heightened Chinese import penetration curbs corporate misconduct of U.S. firms. The effect is more pronounced for firms with weaker corporate governance and firms more vulnerable to product market competition. The findings provide implications for firms facing increased import penetration. Firms may consider (...) improving corporate governance and exploring avenues for differentiation as potential strategies to cope with the competition. In addition, we address the exogeneity concern derived from the influence of Chinese value penetration. Furthermore, we find that competition-related policies such as tariff reduction and U.S. granting China Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status also lower corporate misconduct. Our work adds to the debates on competition and corporate misconduct in a cross-country competitive landscape. (shrink)

The second international Chromatiques whiteheadiennes conference was devoted exclusively to the exegesis and contextualization of Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (1925). In order to elucidate the meaning and significance of this epoch-making work, the Proceedings are designed to form "companion" volume. With one paper devoted to each of its thirteen chapters, the Proceedings aim, on the one hand, to identify the specific contribution of each chapter to Whitehead's own research program - that is to say, to put its categories (...) into perspective by means of an internal analysis- and, on the other hand, to identify its global impact in the history of ideas. (shrink)

Writing from a scientifically and philosophically informed perspective, the authors provide a critical overview of the conceptual difficulties encountered in many current neuroscientific and psychological theories.

Entrevista a Edgardo Castro realizada por Harold Dupuis, el 14 de noviembre de 2022.

This experiment used event-related potentials to study the tactile-visual information conflict processing in a tactile-visual pairing task and its modulation by tactile-induced emotional states. Eighteen participants were asked to indicate whether the tactile sensation on their body matched or did not match the expected tactile sensation associated with the object depicted in an image. The type of tactile-visual stimuli and the valence of tactile-induced emotional states were manipulated following a 2 × 2 factorial design. Electrophysiological analyses revealed a mismatched minus (...) matched negative difference component between 420 and 620 ms after stimulus onset in the negative tactile-induced emotional state condition. This ND420-620 component was considered as a sign of the cross-modal conflict processing during the processing of incongruent tactile-visual information. In contrast, no significant mismatched minus matched negative difference component was found in the positive tactile-induced emotional state condition. Together, these results support the hypothesis that a positive emotional state induced by a positive tactile stimulation improves tactile-visual conflict processing abilities. (shrink)

A long-standing theme in discussion of perception and thought has been that our primary cognitive contact with individual objects and events in the world derives from our perceptual contact with them. When I look at a duck in front of me, I am not merely presented with the fact that there is at least one duck in the area, rather I seem to be presented withthisthing (as one might put it from my perspective) in front of me, which looks to (...) me to be a duck. Furthermore, such a perception would seem to put me in a position not merely to make the existential judgment that there is some duck or other present, but rather to make a singular, demonstrative judgment, that that is a duck. My grounds for an existential judgment in this case derives from my apprehension of the demonstrative thought and not vice versa. (shrink)

Productivity—the hallmark of linguistic competence—is typically attributed to algebraic rules that support broad generalizations. Past research on spoken language has documented such generalizations in both adults and infants. But whether algebraic rules form part of the linguistic competence of signers remains unknown. To address this question, here we gauge the generalization afforded by American Sign Language (ASL). As a case study, we examine reduplication (X→XX)—a rule that, inter alia, generates ASL nouns from verbs. If signers encode this rule, then they (...) should freely extend it to novel syllables, including ones with features that are unattested in ASL. And since reduplicated disyllables are preferred in ASL, such rule should favor novel reduplicated signs. Novel reduplicated signs should thus be preferred to nonreduplicative controls (in rating), and consequently, such stimuli should also be harder to classify as nonsigns (in the lexical decision task). The results of four experiments support this prediction. These findings suggest that the phonological knowledge of signers includes powerful algebraic rules. The convergence between these conclusions and previous evidence for phonological rules in spoken language suggests that the architecture of the phonological mind is partly amodal. (shrink)

This book defends antitheodicism, arguing that theodicies, seeking to excuse God for evil and suffering in the world, fail to ethically acknowledge the victims of suffering. The authors argue for this view using literary and philosophical resources, commencing with Immanuel Kant's 1791 "Theodicy Essay" and its reading of the Book of Job. Three important twentieth century antitheodicist positions are explored, including "Jewish" post-Holocaust ethical antitheodicism, Wittgensteinian antitheodicism exemplified by D.Z. Phillips and pragmatist antitheodicism defended by William James. The authors argue (...) that these approaches to evil and suffering are fundamentally Kantian. Literary works such as Franz Kafka'sThe Trial, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, are examined in order to crucially advance the philosophical case for antitheodicism. (shrink)

In his last book, David Armstrong sets out his metaphysical system in a set of concise and lively chapters each dealing with one aspect of the world. He begins with the assumption that all that exists is the physical world of space-time. On this foundation he constructs a coherent metaphysical scheme that gives plausible answers to many of the great problems of metaphysics. He gives accounts of properties, relations, and particulars; laws of nature; modality; abstract objects such as numbers; and (...) time and mind. (shrink)

This volume addresses the recent concern over the state of education in the U.S. today by tracing the history of educational theory from its classical roots to the reforms recommended by early and later liberals.

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Is consciousness a purely physical phenomenon? Most contemporary philosophers and theorists hold that it is, and take this to be supported by modern science. But a significant minority endorse non-physicalist theories such as dualism, idealism and panpsychism, among other reasons because it may seem impossible to fully explain consciousness, or capture what it's like to be in conscious states (such as seeing red, or being in pain), in physical terms. This Element will introduce the main non-physicalist theories of consciousness and (...) explain the most important arguments for them, and consider how they each respond to the scientific and other arguments in support of physicalism. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

Western democracy is now at a critical juncture. Some worry that power has been wrested from the people and placed in the hands of a small political elite. Others argue that the democratic system gives too much power to a populace that is largely ill-informed and easily swayed by demagogues. This classic study of democratic principles is thus now more relevant than ever. A renowned historian of antiquity and political philosophy, Sir M.I. Finley offers a comparative analysis of Greek and (...) modern conceptions of democracy. As he puts the ancient Greeks in dialogue with their contemporary counterparts, Finley tackles some of the most pressing issues of our day, including public apathy, partisanship, consensus politics, distrust of professional politicians, and the limits of free speech. Including three lectures that Finley delivered at Rutgers University, plus two additional essays that further illuminate his thinking, _Democracy Ancient and Modern _explores the dramatic differences between the close-knit civil society of the ancient Greeks and our own atomized mass societies. By mapping out democracy’s past and its present manifestations, this book helps us plot a course for democracy’s future. (shrink)

This book focuses on major educational philosophies impacting Western education and makes sense of past and current trends placed in historical context. This third edition is updated with the swift changes taking place in education and looks at postmodernism as it has continued to develop during the past fifty years.