ABSTRACTIn clinical circles, the concept of “moral injury” has rapidly gained traction. Yet, from a moral philosophical point of view the concept is less clear than is suggested. That is, in current conceptualizations of moral injury, trauma’s moral dimension seems to be understood in a rather mechanistic and individualized manner. This article makes a start in developing an adequately founded conceptualization of the role of morality in deployment-related distress. It does so by reviewing and synthesizing insights from different disciplines into (...) morality and trauma. This discussion will lead to three positions: values and norms are by definition characterized by conflict, moral conflict may entail important social dimensions, and moral conflict may lead to altered beliefs about previously held values. These insights provide important steps in further developing conceptions of the role of morality in deployment-related suffering. (shrink)

Tolerance for blood transfusion risks is very low, as evidenced by the implementation of expensive blood tests and the rejection of gay men as blood donors. Is this low risk tolerance supported by the precautionary principle, as defenders of such policies claim? We discuss three constraints on applying the precautionary principle and show that respecting these implies tolerating certain risks. Consistency means that the precautionary principle cannot prescribe precautions that it must simultaneously forbid taking, considering the harms they might cause. (...) Avoiding counterproductivity requires rejecting precautions that cause more harm than they prevent. Proportionality forbids taking precautions that are more harmful than adequate alternatives. When applying these constraints, we argue, attention should not be restricted to harms that are human caused or that affect human health or the environment. Tolerating transfusion risks can be justified if available precautions have serious side effects, such as high social or economic costs. (shrink)

BACKGROUND: The availability of costly safety measures against transfusion-transmissible infections forces Western countries to confront difficult ethical questions. How to decide about implementing such measures? When are such decisions justified? As a preliminary to addressing these questions, we assessed which concerns shape actual donor blood safety policymaking in five Western countries. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: Our qualitative study involved determining which issues had been discussed in advisory committee meetings and capturing these issues in general categories. Appropriate documents were identified in (...) collaboration with local decision-making experts in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The introduction of hepatitis B virus nucleic acid testing and selected measures against variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, West Nile virus, and Q-fever were chosen as cases representing decision-making on safety measures with high costs and low or uncertain added safety. RESULTS: A broad inventory of concerns was established, including: 1) nine categories of advantages and disadvantages of candidate safety policies; 2) six kinds of difficulties in assessing risks and forecasting the effects of safety policies; 3) 13 decision-making principles; and 4) six kinds of practical barriers hampering the translation of candidate policies into decisions. CONCLUSION: Blood safety policymaking involves a wide variety of competing concerns, and approaches to reconcile these considerations are themselves contested. Developing a systematic decision-making approach requires ethical reflection on, among others, reasonable costs of safety and the value of transparency in public policy. (shrink)

About the relationship of the two traditions of Platonic interpretation the indirect and the direct traditions, the written dialogues and the unwritten doctrines.

With the late Author’s kind permission, the present text is published here in a somewhat abbreviated and modified translation that has been given appropriate subheadings and supplemented with an extensive bibliography. Its German original from 1996 has been translated into French and English. The purpose of the present translation is to make the Polish reader acquainted with the important and innovative account of Plato’s philosophy that has been put forward by the Tübingen School whose one of the most prominent co-founders (...) was Hans Joachim Krämer. While this text is devoted to Plato’s critique of writing, it also presents Plato’s agrapha dogmata as an important supplement to the written dialogues. A fuller overview of the major assumptions of this new interpretation is to be found in the recently published Gesammelte Ansätze zu Platon. (shrink)

Ever since the proposal of Giovanni Reale, it has been useful to distinguish three “paradigms,” or models of “normal science,” in Thomas Kuhn’s sense, in the history of Platonic scholarship, each of which are relatively distinct from the others in their historical succession: the Neoplatonic model which persisted into modern times; the “Romantic” model which replaced it and whose foundations were formulated around 1800 by Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher, and which was until recently the guiding model for history, philology (...) and philosophy; and lastly the model that takes both the literary and indirect Platonic traditions, integrates them, uses them to supplement one another, and so in part preserves and in part modifies the second model by a perspectival “paradigm shift”. The new research program justified itself in view of the surplus of anomalies left by the old program, which had to leave certain central portions of the tradition unexplained or else forcefully reinterpret them. Meanwhile, the new program promised to progressively work off the explanatory deficit. The new program was also able to emerge as an alternative because the explanatory abilities of the old program had visibly declined into a state of stagnation and exhaustion. That program had not achieved the hoped-for explanatory goals: neither the extraction of the philosophical content of Platonic dialogues by an analysis of form, nor the evaluation of the relative chronology of the dialogues for the inner development of their philosophical thought. (shrink)

Summary This article analyzes the possibility of cooperation between philosophy and the history of philosophy. It approaches this task more precisely than has been the case in the discussion heretofore, seeing in this relationship an ideal case, typifying the relationship of systematic to historical disciplines in general. To begin with, a distinction must be made between a naively received history of philosophy and the critical study of philosophy's history. Further distinctions to be made are among receivedcontent, receptionprocesses and the five (...) main categories of the history of philosophy'sfunctions for systematic philosophy (primary information, hermeneutics, heuristics, genetic reflexion and validity tests). Heuristics and validation may be subsumed under the category ofintegration and be brought into relation to the truth criteria of coherence and consensus. The hermeneutical and reflective functions may be understood as proto-heuristics and proto-validation and thereby receive secondorder functionalization. (shrink)