The Johns Hopkins‐Fogarty African Bioethics Training Program (FABTP) has offered a fully‐funded, one‐year, non‐degree training opportunity in research ethics to health professionals, ethics committee members, scholars, journalists and scientists from countries across sub‐Saharan Africa. In the first 9 years of operation, 28 trainees from 13 African countries have trained with FABTP. Any capacity building investment requires periodic critical evaluation of the impact that training dollars produce. In this paper we describe and evaluate FABTP and the efforts of its (...) trainees.Our data show that since 2001, the 28 former FABTP trainees have authored or co‐authored 105 new bioethics‐related publications; were awarded 33 bioethics‐related grants; played key roles on 78 bioethics‐related research studies; and participated in 198 bioethics workshops or conferences. Over the past nine years, trainees have collectively taught 48 separate courses related to bioethics and have given 170 presentations on various topics in the field. Many former trainees have pursued and completed doctoral degrees in bioethics; some have become editorial board members for bioethics journals. Female trainees were, on average, less experienced at matriculation and produced fewer post‐training outputs than their male counterparts. More comprehensive studies are needed to determine the relationships between age, sex, previous experience and training program outputs. (shrink)

The Johns Hopkins-Fogarty African Bioethics Training Program (FABTP) has offered a fully-funded, one-year, non-degree training opportunity in research ethics to health professionals, ethics committee members, scholars, journalists and scientists from countries across sub-Saharan Africa. In the first 9 years of operation, 28 trainees from 13 African countries have trained with FABTP. Any capacity building investment requires periodic critical evaluation of the impact that training dollars produce. In this paper we describe and evaluate FABTP and the efforts of its (...) trainees.Our data show that since 2001, the 28 former FABTP trainees have authored or co-authored 105 new bioethics-related publications; were awarded 33 bioethics-related grants; played key roles on 78 bioethics-related research studies; and participated in 198 bioethics workshops or conferences. Over the past nine years, trainees have collectively taught 48 separate courses related to bioethics and have given 170 presentations on various topics in the field. Many former trainees have pursued and completed doctoral degrees in bioethics; some have become editorial board members for bioethics journals. Female trainees were, on average, less experienced at matriculation and produced fewer post-training outputs than their male counterparts. More comprehensive studies are needed to determine the relationships between age, sex, previous experience and training program outputs. (shrink)

This study examines the importance of microcultural differences on perceived ethical problems. This study also sought to identify the relationship between perceived ethical problems and value orientations as shown in the Hunt and Vitell's (1993) General Theory of Marketing Ethics. The data was collected from 173 Javanese, 128 Batak, and 170 Indonesian-Chinese marketing managers in Indonesia. The results indicate that, (1) Religious Value Orientation is positively related to the perceived ethical problems scores, and (2) there are significant differences among (...) the three ethnic microcultural groups relative to their perceived ethical problems scores. These results imply that acculturation training program for expatriates should include aspects of microcultures and ethical perceptions held by the local managers. The establishment of ethical corporate culture and formalised codes of conduct are recommended for future ethics training. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Pragmatist Ethics: A Problem-Based Approach to What Matters by James Jakób LiszkaHenrik RydenfeltJames Jakób Liszka (Ed) Pragmatist Ethics: A Problem-Based Approach to What Matters Albany: SUNY Press, 2021; 192 pp., incl. indexThere appears to be increasing interest in public discussion and debate on ethical issues in our societies motivated by concerns regarding economic growth within the limits of the environment, the development [End Page 253] of (...) "autonomous" machines and advances in artificial intelligence, and issues of justice and equality under conditions of global emergencies such as climate change. Over the past twenty years, numerous philosophers have produced important works on the ethical perspectives and social and political philosophy of the classic thinkers of the pragmatist tradition, including several volumes on John Dewey and William James, and a volume on Charles S. Peirce that James Liszka also published in 2021. However, there exist few general statements of the potential of the pragmatist approach to the topic of ethics in general. For this reason, Liszka's new book outlining pragmatist ethics is welcome. Despite its concise presentation of only about 170 pages, Liszka manages to discuss a number of pragmatist notions and views both in their historical context and in contrast and comparison with contemporary arguments, particularly ones developed in the fields of metaethics and normative ethics of the analytic tradition.As both a scholar and a philosopher, Liszka offers his own perspective on the pragmatist approach and what is unique and distinctive about it. In the introduction, the pragmatist perspective is described as beginning with an examination of actual problems to develop solutions that may reveal what would be good or better than the present, rather than aiming at the development of a concept of the good that could then be applied in particular cases. The remainder of the book can be characterised as developing this notion of ethics through the lenses of philosophical debates, both historical and contemporary, on practical reasoning, community, inquiry, and moral progress. Following the introduction, Liszka presents in the second chapter his pragmatist, problem-based ethics as a response to the "tragedy of life", in the sense of an inevitable conflict of goods and values, with the melioristic slogan "solve problems, and good will follow". In the third chapter, Liszka delves deeper into the roots of his problem-based ethics by looking at the writings of the classical pragmatists, including Peirce's maxim of pragmatism, James's account of truth as that which brings us into a satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience, Peirce's notion of the community of inquiry, and Dewey's account of democracy as the setting for solving the problems of the community. James Wallace's account of practices as potential solutions for problems provides Liszka with an important stepping stone to his conclusion, drawn at the end of this chapter, that in order to solve problems, practices must aim to attain a good end in the right way.However, this formal conclusion does not provide specific guidance on how problems should be solved. Providing such guidance is the task of practical reason, the subject of chapter four. Liszka's discussion develops pragmatist perspectives on practical reasoning based on Wallace's account, Robert Brandom's distinctions between shapes of practical reasoning, as well as Peirce's account of desire. All of these are brought to [End Page 254] bear in long-standing debates in meta-ethics. In particular, to counter subjectivism and other familiar issues with the Humean desire-belief account of moral motivation (or internalism about moral motivation), Liszka—again drawing from Wallace's notion—argues that practices are not subjective but collectively approved and institutionalised.The presence of problems indicates that something is not working within the practice in question. Pragmatists typically suggest that inquiry could be deployed to solve problems. This is why in chapter five normative science is considered. Liszka's central project is to make sense of the pragmatist stance that moral inquiries and judgments can be made scientific, and that normative claims can be tested by observing the results actually attained. Liszka argues that "the norms of practical reasoning derive their... (shrink)

This paper contributes to the contemporary business ethics narrative by proposing an approach to corporate ethical decision making (EDM) which serves as an alternative to the imposition of codes and standards to address the ethical consequences of grand challenges, like COVID-19, which are impacting today’s society. Our alternative approach to EDM embraces the concept of reflexive thinking and ethical consciousness among the individual agents who collectively are the corporation and who make ethical decisions, often in isolation, removed from the (...) collocated corporate setting. We draw on the teachings of the Canadian philosopher and theologian, Fr. Bernard Lonergan, to conceptualize an approach to EDM which focuses on the ethics of the corporate agent by nurturing the universal and invariant structure that is operational in all human beings. Embracing Lonergan’s dynamic cognitive structure of human knowing, and the structure of the human good, we advance a paradigm of EDM in business which emboldens authentic ethical thought, decision making, and action commensurate with virtuous living and germane to human flourishing. Lonergan’s philosophy guides us away from the imposition of over-arching corporate codes of ethics and inspires us, as individual agents, to attend to the data of our own consciousness in our ethical decision making. Such cognitional endowment leads us out of the ethics of the ‘timeless present’ (Islam and Greenwood in Journal of Business Ethics 170: 1–4, 2021) towards ethical authenticity in business, leaving us better placed to reflect upon and address the ethical issues emanating from grand challenges like COVID-19. (shrink)

Dan Shahar’s Why It’s OK to Eat Meat is an accessible and provocative defense of the claim that one can be morally justified in eating meat even when that meat has been produced via factory farming...

Ethics in research became a central theme regarding globalization of the scientific development, particularly when related to the socioeconomic conditions of the countries involved as partners in research protocols, production of inputs and of knowledge. The objective of this paper is to analyze the sources of information about ethics in research present at Scientific Electronic Library Online. Methodologically, this is an exploratory study was carried out by the systematic analysis of the literature available. The search engines retrieved 885 (...) summaries, from which 170 were analyzed. The first publication was dated from 1996 and it could be identified the mention to international documents about research in humans. Since 2002 there has been an increase of publications related to the gain of legitimacy of the topic in academy. As a conclusion, although the amount is not huge, the manuscripts presented great impact as they stimulated debates and produced scientific knowledge on the topic. It can be observed that ethics in research has outcome the biomedical field, being inserted in other fields of knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Oppression, Normative Violence, and VulnerabilityThe Ambiguous Beauvoirian Legacy of Butler’s EthicsLisa C. KniselyJudith Butler’s most recent writings are a sophisticated theorization of the significance of human vulnerability as a resource for “a non-violent ethics... that is based upon an understanding of how easily human life is annulled” (Butler 2004, xvii). Butler argues that recognition of the constitutive vulnerability of human existence provides the condition of possibility through which (...) we can respond to an ethical “appeal” or “call” for nonviolence (Butler 2009, 165, 170). This recent work carries on the feminist theoretical tradition of theorizing nonviolence via an attention to human vulnerability that has been strongly present in feminist care ethics (Held 2006; Kittay 1999; Ruddick 1989; Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). However, rather than turning to the care ethicists to think through the ethical relationship between vulnerability and violence, Butler produces an innovative feminist ethics by turning to a variety of thinkers in continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, such as Hegel, Freud, Cavarero, and especially Levinas. Butler’s recent discussion of the ethical import of human vulnerability therefore extends a long-standing feminist tradition of arguing for nonviolence while also helping to expand the theoretical resources feminists have used for this task.This article places Butler’s recent ethical focus on nonviolence1 in conversation with Simone de Beauvoir’s earlier existentialist feminist ethical writings2 [End Page 145] concerning the ethico-political import of violence. Together, these two thinkers reorient the dominant feminist conversation about violence away from an emphasis on women’s violent and oppressive victimization and toward an idea of gendered actors who are simultaneously ethically enabled and constrained by the bodily, historical, and political situations out of which they act. Ultimately, however, Beauvoir’s argument that ethics are always deeply contextual and are thus normatively ambiguous is a preferable feminist alternative to Butler’s attempt to delineate a specifically nonviolent ethics. This is because Beauvoir gives thorough attention to contexts of oppression as a major mitigating factor that shapes our ethical possibilities.For Beauvoir, there is no guarantee that a nonviolent response to vulnerability is a priori the most ethical response. Beauvoir does not insist on a nonviolent ethics because the ethicality of violence must be derived from within the embodied situations out of which people are acting. Ethicality cannot be determined prior to, or outside of, the lived contexts in which people are situated. Beauvoir’s ethics remind contemporary feminist theorists that both vulnerability, and responses to vulnerability, whether violent or nonviolent, are always contextually mediated by the forces of history, politics, and circumstance. This reminder is essential if we do not wish feminist ethical claims to override the feminist political goal of lessening oppression. Beauvoir’s attention to contextual specificity shows us that our possible responses to vulnerability are ethically ambiguous in the sense that no normative claim about how one ought to respond to human vulnerability, taken in the abstract, can be elucidated without the risk of making our ethics potentially oppressive.By returning to Beauvoir’s ethics, especially Beauvoir’s attention to oppression and freedom, the discussion here is meant to echo the concerns of a growing number of contemporary feminist theorists who express hesitation about the recent “turn” to vulnerability in feminist theory (Bergoffen 2001; Butler 2004, 2005, 2009; Fineman 2008; Oliver 2008)3 and more generally about moral claims that are made in the name of feminism (Murphy 2009; Dean 2008; Halley 2008; Mills 2007; Brown 1995). In addition, the emphasis on Beauvoir’s ethics here is meant to help return the contemporary feminist discussion of violence toward a more general emphasis on the importance of thinking about freedom as a primary feminist concern (Zerilli 2005; Willett 2001, 1995). Beauvoir’s ethics demonstrate that the ethicality of our responses to vulnerability cannot be judged without a thorough attention to the ethical freedom4 of oppressed ethical actors.Feminist ethicists have tended to undervalue attention to specific historico-political contexts in their discussions of violence as they develop normative arguments against violence. As Kimberly Hutchings notes in her article “Simone de Beauvoir and the Ambiguous Ethics of Political Violence,” there are two contemporary feminist positions on violence... (shrink)

Preface ix Acknowledgements xi 1 Introduction: towards an acceptable fideism 1 The metaquestion: what is the issue about the ‘justifiability’ of religious belief? 4 Faith-beliefs 6 Overview of the argument 8 Glossary of special terms 18 2 The ‘justifiability’ of faith-beliefs: an ultimately moral issue 26 A standard view: the concern is for epistemic justifiability 26 The problem of doxastic control 28 The impossibility of believing at will 29 Indirect control over beliefs 30 ‘Holding true’ and ‘taking to be true’ (...) 33 A second—direct—locus of doxastic control 35 Moral doxastic responsibilities 41 The moral significance of faith-beliefs 47 Linking moral to epistemic justifiability: reinstating the standard view? 48 3 The epistemic justifiability of faith-beliefs: an ambiguity thesis 53 Plausibility of requiring epistemic for moral justifiability under a realist interpretation of faith-beliefs 53 Interpreting the link principle: epistemic entitlement as requiring evidential justification 55 Evidentialist requirements specified by an implicit evidential practice 65 Rational empiricist evidential practice 66 Applying rational empiricist evidential practice to theistic faith-beliefs: an ambiguity thesis 68 vi contents 4 Responses to evidential ambiguity: isolationist and Reformed epistemologies 77 Two strategies for defending the moral probity of theistic faith-belief in the face of evidential ambiguity 78 Appealing to a special theistic evidential practice/improved epistemologies 79 An isolationist epistemology 79 Reformed epistemology 86 Conclusion: the need for a fideist response to ambiguity 99 5 Faith as doxastic venture 101 Agenda for a defence of doxastic venture 102 The nature of theistic faith 103 The doxastic venture model 106 The psychological possibility of doxastic venture 111 A Jamesian account 112 ‘Passionally’ caused beliefs 113 6 Believing by faith: a Jamesian position 122 An initial hypothesis for a Jamesian thesis on permissible doxastic venture 123 The notion of a ‘genuine option’ 125 A ‘degrees of belief ’ challenge 128 Evidentially undecidable forced options 129 Permissible doxastic venture: supra- not counter-evidential 135 How theistic religion could present essentially evidentially undecidable genuine options: the notion of a highest-order framing principle 137 Restricting thesis ( Ji) to faith-propositions: thesis ( J) 145 7 Integrationist values: limiting permissible doxastic venture 151 Can counter-evidential fideism be non-arbitrarily excluded? 151 A coherence requirement and integrationist values 155 Moral integration of faith-commitments 163 Implications for reflective faith-believers 167 Coda: A reflection on Abraham as forebear in faith 170 contents vii 8 Arguments for supra-evidential fideism 174 The importance of defending the epistemic permissibility of faith-ventures 176 Strategies for supporting fideism 178 An ‘assimilation to personal relations cases’ strategy: experimental ventures in interpersonal trust 180 The ‘assimilation to personal relations cases’ strategy: cases where ‘faith in a fact can help create a fact’ 182 A consequentialist strategy 185 A note on Pascal’s Wager 187 The tu quoque strategy 189 Is hard-line evidentialism self-undermining? 190 Attitudes to passional doxastic inclinations 194 Epistemological externalism again: a presumption in favour of fideism? 196 Scepticism about passional doxastic inclinations as guides to truth: how passions may be schooled 197 The significance of scientific theories of passional motivations for faith-commitment 204 An impasse? 206 9 A moral preference for modest fideism? 208 Implications of accepting ( J+) for orthodox and revisionary theistic faith-ventures 209 The apparent fideist/evidentialist impasse and its implications 211 Beyond impasse? Direct moral evaluation of the fideist/evidentialist debate 215 Self-acceptance and authenticity 216 Hard-line evidentialism as grounded in doctrinaire naturalism 220 Coherence amongst moral and religious passional commitments 225 Conclusion 227 Bibliography 230 Index 237. (shrink)

A set of basic static predicates, 'in itself, 'existing through itself, 'free', and others are taken to be (at least) extensionally equivalent, and some consequences are drawn in Parts A and? of the paper. Part C introduces adequate causation and adequate conceiving as extensionally equivalent. The dynamism or activism of Spinoza is reflected in the reconstruction by equating action with causing, passion (passive emotion) with being caused. The relation between conceiving (understanding) and causing is narrowed down by introducing grasping (λ (...) μβ?νω) as a basic epistemological term. Part D, 'The road to freedom through active emotion', introduces a system of grading with respect to the distinctions introduced in the foregoing, including 'being in itself, 'freedom', etc. Active emotions are seen to represent transitions to a higher degree of freedom, the stronger and more active ones being the more conducive to rapid increase in degree of freedom. Elementary parts of the calculus of predicates are used in order to facilitate the survey of conceptual relations and to prove some theorems. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 293-302.

Aggregative consequentialism and several other popular moral theories are threatened with paralysis: when coupled with some plausible assumptions, they seem to imply that it is always ethically indifferent what you do. Modern cosmology teaches that the world might well contain an infinite number of happy and sad people and other candidate value-bearing locations. Aggregative ethics implies that such a world contains an infinite amount of positive value and an infinite amount of negative value. You can affect only a finite (...) amount of good or bad. In standard cardinal arithmetic, an infinite quantity is unchanged by the addition or subtraction of any finite quantity. So it appears you cannot change the value of the world. Modifications of aggregationism aimed at resolving the paralysis are only partially effective and cause severe side effects, including problems of “fanaticism”, “distortion”, and erosion of the intuitions that originally motivated the theory. Is the infinitarian challenge fatal? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 14.1 (2004) 47-54 [Access article in PDF] Ethical Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research*(A Recommended Manuscript) Adopted on 16 October 2001Revised on 20 August 2002 Ethics Committee of the Chinese National Human Genome Center at Shanghai, Shanghai 201203 Human embryonic stem cell (ES) research is a great project in the frontier of biomedical science for the twenty-first century. Be- cause the (...) research involves the use of human embryos, it triggers serious debate on ethical issues. Opponents consider the embryo to be an early form of human life that should be respected and not destroyed. However, the majority of scientists support embryonic stem cell research, believing that it offers good prospects for the treatment of diseases that have remained incurable until now and so will benefit humankind. The Ethics Committee of the Department of Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Chinese National Human Genome Center at Shanghai seriously discussed the ethical debate initiated by embryonic stem cell research. We concluded that we should support the scientists of our country in actively carrying out human embryonic stem cell research for the noble cause of "medicine being a beneficent art." For the healthy and orderly development of human embryonic stem cell research in our country, we put forward the following recommended Ethical Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research as a reference for leaders, administrative departments, and related scientists. Preface Article 1. Human embryonic stem cells are the primitive cells that play the main role in the growth and development of a human body. These [End Page 47] primitive cells have the potential for infinite proliferation, self-renewal, and multi-directional differentiation. If scientists can discover the mechanism of differentiation of human embryonic stem cells, it will be possible to induce differentiation of human embryonic stem cells to form various types of human cells for clinical cell therapy. If human embryonic stem cell research can be integrated with modern biomedical engineering techniques, it also will be possible to make repair and replacement of human tissues and organs a reality. Article 2. There are two ways to classify human embryonic stem cells. One way is to classify them according to their potential for differentiation. There could be three kinds of stem cells: totipotent stem cells, pluripotent stem cells, and unipotent stem cells.A totipotent stem cell has the potential to develop into a whole individual. It can differentiate into the more than 200 cell types in the whole body, construct any tissue or organ of the body, and finally develop into a whole individual. The fertilized egg and the cleavage cells at the very early stage of embryonic development are totipotent stem cells.A pluripotent stem cell has the potential to differentiate into many cell types derived from the three embryonic layers. However, it has lost the capacity to develop into a complete organism.A unipotent stem cell is derived from the further differentiation of the pluripotent stem cell. It can differentiate only into one cell type such as a hematopoietic stem cell, neural stem cell, and others.The other way is to classify human stem cells according to their source. There could be two kinds of human stem cells: embryonic stem cells and tissue stem cells (also called adult stem cells). The former involves experimentation with embryos, which has serious ethical implications. Ethical issues associated with the latter are mainly expressed in the various opinions regarding the allocation of health resources. Article 3. Human embryonic stem cells are the group of cells called the blastocyst inner cell mass during the early stage of embryonic development. They are the main source of totipotent stem cells, and hence the focal and hot point in stem cell research. Studies on the clinical application of embryonic stem cells probably will involve use of the somatic cell nucleus transfer (SCNT) technique, which destroys the early human embryo. At present, the ethical and moral debate is very serious in human embryonic stem cell research regarding whether the research will develop... (shrink)

Economist-philosopher Amartya Sen's writings on social and political issues have attracted wide audiences. Section 2 introduces his contributions on: how people reason as agents within society; social determinants of people's (lack of) access to goods and of the effective freedoms and agency they enjoy or lack; and associated advocacy of self-specification of identity and high expectations for ‘voice’ and reasoning democracy. Section 3 considers his relation to social theory, his tools for theorizing action in society, and his limited degree of (...) attention to work by sociologists and to capitalism and power structures. Section 4 characterizes a style marked by conceptual refinement, emphases on complexity and individuality, including personal individuality, and reformist optimism. Section 5 shows the features from Sections 3 and 4 at work in his conception of personhood that advocates freedom to make a reasoned composition of personal identity. Similarly, Section 6 addresses his conception of public reasoning and neglect of the sociology of democracy. It contrasts the ideal of a reasoning polity with features in many countries. Sen's programmes for critical autonomy in personhood and for reasoned politics play, nevertheless, a normic role, while his analytical formats help investigation of obstacles to more widespread agency, voice, and democratic participation. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 237-240.

Research question and aimClinical Ethics Committees (CECs) aim to support healthcare professionals (HPs) and healthcare organizations to deal with the ethical issues of clinical practice. In 2020,...

When two actors have the same mental state but one happens to harm another person (unlucky actor) and the other one does not (lucky actor), the latter elicits a milder moral judgement. To understand how this outcome effect would affect post-harm interactions between victims and perpetrators, we examined how the social role from which transgressions are perceived moderates the outcome effect, and how outcome effects on moral judgements transfer to agentic and communal interpersonal goals. Three vignette experiments (N = 950) (...) revealed similar outcome effects on moral judgement across social roles. In contrast, outcome effects on agentic and communal goals varied by social role: victims exhibited the strongest outcome effects and perpetrators the weakest, with bystanders falling in between. Moral judgement did not mediate the effects of outcome severity on interpersonal goals. We discuss the possibility that outcome severity raises normative expectations regarding post-harm interactions that are unrelated to moral considerations. (shrink)

A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across (k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether and consequently exhibited stronger textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a plausible mechanism for the emergence of textualism: (...) in a two-player coordination game, incentives to coordinate in the absence of communication reinforced participants’ adherence to rules’ literal meaning. Together, these studies (total n = 5,794) help clarify the origins and allure of textualism, especially in the law. Within heterogeneous communities in which members diverge in their moral appraisals involving a rule’s purpose, the rule’s literal meaning provides a clear focal point—an identifiable point of agreement enabling coordinated interpretation among citizens, lawmakers, and judges. (shrink)

This special issue is motivated by the observation that conservatism plays a marginal role in contemporary philosophy even though it appears to be of considerable importance in moral, social, and political reality. One reason for this neglect is that defenders of conservatism have often refrained from articulating their arguments in a language that is acceptable to and understandable by analytically -trained philosophers. The contributions of this special issue show that conservatism can profitably be approached from the point of view of (...) analytic philosophy. Many of them are indebted to Jerry Cohen’s (2012) seminal paper on conservative value, which develops a sophisticated justification of what Oakeshott (1991) called the disposition to be conservative. (shrink)

This special issue is motivated by the observation that conservatism plays a marginal role in contemporary philosophy even though it appears to be of considerable importance in moral, social, and political reality. One reason for this neglect is that defenders of conservatism have often refrained from articulating their arguments in a language that is acceptable to and understandable by analytically -trained philosophers. The contributions of this special issue show that conservatism can profitably be approached from the point of view of (...) analytic philosophy. Many of them are indebted to Jerry Cohen’s (2012) seminal paper on conservative value, which develops a sophisticated justification of what Oakeshott (1991) called the disposition to be conservative. (shrink)

A textbook designed for the mandatory semester ethics course at the United States Naval Academy by USNA Ethics Section, with contributions by the Distinguished Chair in Ethics.

This book is a comprehensive and unique text and reference in medical ethics. By far the most inclusive set of primary documents and articles in the field ever published, it contains over 100 selections. Virtually all pieces appear in their entirety, and a significant number would be difficult to obtain elsewhere. The volume draws upon the literature of history, medicine, philosophical and religious ethics, economics, and sociology. A wide range of topics and issues are covered, such as law (...) and medicine, truth-telling by the physician, research, population policy, genetics, abortion, dying, and individual rights in medical care. The selections span the centuries, beginning with material from the works of Hippocrates, continuing through Thomas Percival, John Stuart Mill, and Claude Bernard, down to modern commentators like Henry K. Beecher, Walsh McDermott, David L. Bazelon, Paul Freund, H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Paul Ramsey, Richard McCormick, Rashi Fein, and Bernard Barber. The text has eight major divisions, beginning with sections on the ethical dimensions of the physician-patient relationship in history; the moral bases of medical ethics; and regulation, compulsion, and protection of the consumer in clinical medicine and public health. Each of these sections includes key essays that appear for the first time. All of the book's major divisions contain primary documents: codes such as the Hippocratic Oath, Medieval Law for the Regulation of Medicine, and the first as well as the most recent code of the American Medical Association; court decisions, including those on Karen Quinlan and on abortion in the United States and West Germany; government documents such as the statement of the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects, the Tuskegee Syphilis Report, the British Parliamentary debate on euthanasia, and the Council of Europe on rights of the sick and dying; and various published guidelines such as the Harvard Medical School brain death criteria, the American Hospital Association on patient's rights, and Pope Pius XII on the prolongation of life. Cases that illustrate moral dilemmas are provided for discussion purposes. Each section is preceded by a succinct editor's introduction. The documents and essays are of practical value for practitioners and students in medicine, law, ethics, and counselling, and for individual patients and groups concerned with medical care. Through encompassing divergent viewpoints, the essays and primary documents were selected to encourage humane practices and deepen understanding of the multiple traditions that shaped and do shape the development of medicine. (shrink)