The American Medical Association enacted its Code of Ethics in 1847, the first such national codification. In this volume, a distinguished group of experts from the fields of medicine, bioethics, and history of medicine reflect on the development of medical ethics in the United States, using historical analyses as a springboard for discussions of the problems of the present, including what the editors call "a sense of moral crisis precipitated by the shift from a system of fee-for-service medicine to a (...) system of fee-for-system medicine, better known as 'managed care.'" The authors begin with a look at how the medical profession began to consider ethical issues in the 1800s and subsequent developments in the 1900s. They then address the sociological, historical, ethical, and legal aspects of the practice of medicine. Later chapters discuss current and future challenges to medical ethics and professional values. Appendixes display various versions of the AMA's Code of Ethics as it has evolved over time. Contributors: George J. Annas, J.D., M.P.H., Arthur Isak Applbaum, Ph.D., Robert B. Baker, Ph.D., Chester R. Burns, M.D., Ph.D., Arthur L. Caplan, Ph.D., Alexander Morgan Capron, J.D., Christine K. Cassel, M.D., Linda L. Emanuel, M.D., Ph.D., Eliot L. Freidson, Ph.D., Albert R. Jonsen, Ph.D., Stephen R. Latham, J.D., Ph.D., Susan E. Lederer, Ph.D., Florencia Luna, Ph.D., Edmund D. Pellegrino, M.D., Charles E. Rosenberg, Ph.D., Mark Siegler, M.D., Rosemary A. Stevens, Ph.D., Robert M. Tenery, Jr., M.D., Robert M. Veatch, Ph.D., John Harley Warner, Ph.D., Paul Root Wolpe, Ph.D. (shrink)

Over 115 000 people are waiting for life-saving organ transplants, of whom a small fraction will receive transplants and many others will die while waiting. Existing efforts to expand the number of available organs, including increasing the number of registered donors and procuring organs in uncontrolled environments, are crucial but unlikely to address the shortage in the near future and will not improve donor/recipient compatibility or organ quality. If successful, organ bioengineering can solve the shortage and improve functional outcomes. Studying (...) manufactured organs in animal models has produced valuable data, but is not sufficient to understand viability in humans. Before risking manufactured organ experimentation in living humans, study of bioengineered organs in recently deceased humans would facilitate evaluation of the function of engineered tissues and the complex interactions between the host and the transplanted tissue. Although such studies do not pose risk to human subjects, they pose unique ethical challenges concerning the previous wishes of the deceased, rights of surviving family members, effective operation and fair distribution of medical services, and public transparency. This article investigates the ethical, legal and social considerations in performing engineered organ research on the recently deceased. (shrink)

Excerpt from Outlines of Logic, Psychology and Ethics The following pages do not lay claim to originality of thought, or even of language. But they cover the whole ground of the Mental and Moral Philosophy Course for the London University Pass B.A., and, in manuscript form, have been found useful by students preparing for that examination. In later years the questions on each branch of the course appear to have been set from a constantly enlarging circle of text-books; and the (...) student who confines himself to one or two authorities, however excellent these may be, is sure to meet with many questions for which he is totally unprepared; while, if he extends the range of his reading, he is very likely to concentrate his attention on what is superfluous and, for his immediate purpose, without value. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Research involving recently deceased humans that are physiologically maintained following declaration of death by neurologic criteria—or ‘research involving the recently deceased’—can fill a translational research gap while reducing harm to animals and living human subjects. It also creates new challenges for honouring the donor’s legacy, respecting the rights of donor loved ones, resource allocation and public health. As this research model gains traction, new empirical ethics questions must be answered to preserve public trust in all forms of tissue donation and (...) in the practice of medicine while respecting the legacy of the deceased and the rights of donor loved ones. This article suggests several topics for immediate investigation to understand the attitudes and experiences of researchers, clinical collaborators, donor loved ones and the public to ensure research involving the recently deceased advances ethically. (shrink)

Senses of place are strongly intertwined with senses of heritage and cultural identity. Heritage places are distinctive not only for their tangible dimensions, but also the intangible qualities which give them meaning. The conservation of heritage places, however, has often emphasised the materiality of place rather than its symbolic significance. This article explores issues surrounding sense of place and heritage management through a focus on the former site of the Paradise Hotel in Norfolk Island’s Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic (...) Area. Drawing on interviews and a zine co-created with Norfolk Island residents, the article unpacks various ways participants articulate connections to the Paradise via their memories and recollections of the past as well as their present interpretation of and engagement with the site. Through a localised case study, the article provides insight into transnational challenges for the relationship between sense of place, heritage value and heritage management and interpretation. (shrink)

Robin Donkin was an exceptional scholar in the field of historical geography, particularly concerning Latin America and the domestication of plants and animals globally. His early research was on the effect of the Cistercians on medieval landscape, and he held posts at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Brimingham. Donkin then lectured in Latin American geography at the University of Cambridge. He was a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy (...) in 1985. Obituary by Alan R. H. Baker FBA. (shrink)

Bioethicists function in an environment in which their peers - healthcare executives, lawyers, nurses, physicians - assert the integrity of their fields through codes of professional ethics. Is it time for bioethics to assert its integrity by developing a code of ethics? Answering in the affirmative, this paper lays out a case by reviewing the historical nature and function of professional codes of ethics. Arguing that professional codes are aggregative enterprises growing in response to a field's historical experiences, it asserts (...) that bioethics now needs to assert its integrity and independence and has already developed a body of formal statements that could be aggregated to create a comprehensive code of ethics for bioethics. A Draft Model Aggregated Code of Ethics for Bioethicists is offered in the hope that analysis and criticism of this draft code will promote further discussion of the nature and content of a code of ethics for bioethicists. (shrink)

Within the context of the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument, one discussion about the status of mathematics is concerned with the ‘Enhanced Indispensability Argument’, which makes explicit in what way mathematics is supposed to be indispensable in science, namely explanatory. If there are genuine mathematical explanations of empirical phenomena, an argument for mathematical platonism could be extracted by using inference to the best explanation. The best explanation of the primeness of the life cycles of Periodical Cicadas is genuinely mathematical, according to (...) class='Hi'>Baker :223–238, 2005; Br J Philos Sci 60:611–633, 2009). Furthermore, the result is then also used to strengthen the platonist position :779–793, 2017a). We pick up the circularity problem brought up by Leng Mathematical reasoning, heuristics and the development of mathematics, King’s College Publications, London, pp 167–189, 2005) and Bangu :13–20, 2008). We will argue that Baker’s attempt to solve this problem fails, if Hume’s Principle is analytic. We will also provide the opponent of the Enhanced Indispensability Argument with the so-called ‘interpretability strategy’, which can be used to come up with alternative explanations in case Hume’s Principle is non-analytic. (shrink)

This paper considers four lines of objection to the efficacy or worth of Grice's cancellability test for conversational implicatures – the coherence objection, the entailment objection, the sarcasm objection, and the ambiguity objection. I argue that the test survives these objections relatively unscathed; and hence conclude that the cancellability test is still a significant, useful, reliable indicator at the semantics/pragmatics interface.

I am grateful to Donald Ainslie, Lisa Austin, Michael Blake, Abraham Drassinower, David Dyzenhaus, George Fletcher, Robert Gibbs, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Sari Kisilevsky, Dennis Klimchuk, Christopher Morris, Scott Shapiro, Horacio Spector, Sergio Tenenbaum, Malcolm Thorburn, Ernest Weinrib, Karen Weisman, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for comments, and audiences in the UCLA Philosophy Department and Columbia Law School for their questions.

This brief introduction to a special issue of Disputatio succinctly summarizes John Perry’s pluri-propositionalist reflexive framework and notes some potential applications to varieties of context-sensitivity.

The first history of American medical ethics published in more than a half century, Before Bioethics tracks the evolution of American medical ethics from colonial midwives and physicians' oaths to current bioethical controversies over abortion, AIDS, animal rights, and physician-assisted suicide.

"The past two decades have seen renewed scholarly and popular interest in the law and morality of war. Positions that originated in the late Middle Ages through the 17th century have received more sophisticated philosophical elaboration. Although many contemporary writers draw on ideas that figure prominently in Kant's moral philosophy, his explicit discussions of war have not been brought into their proper place within these discussions and debates. Kant argues that a special morality governs the permissible use of force because (...) of wars distinctive immorality. He characterizes war as barbaric, because in war might makes right - which side prevails does not depend on who is in the right. The very thing that makes war wrongful also provides the appropriate standard for evaluating the conduct of war, and the only basis for law governing war"--. (shrink)

My point of departure is a passage in which Coffa claims: “Wittgenstein’s and Carnap’s insights on the a priori belong in the same family as Kant’s... What we witness circa 1930 is a Copernican turn that, like Kant’s, bears the closest connection to the a priori; but its topic is meaning rather than experience” [Coffa, 1991, p. 263]. I draw out Kantian resonances in Wittgenstein’s and Carnap’s work on logic, grammar, and theoretical frameworks. In the end, Coffa’s remark comes out (...) as significantly illuminating for a variety of questions, issues, and dynamic historical trends. (shrink)

In recent metaphysics, the questions of whether fictional entities exist, what their nature is, and how to explain truths of statements such as “Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street” and “Holmes was created by Arthur Conan Doyle” have been subject to much debate. The main aim of my thesis is to wrestle with key proponents of the abstractionist view that fictional entities are abstract objects that exist (van Inwagen 1977, 2018, Thomasson 1999 and Salmon 1998) as well (...) as Walton’s (1990) pretense view, which denies the existence of such entities. In the process, I propose modifications to these views to deal with problems they face and show how the modifications better account for the philosophical data. -/- Key abstractionists (van Inwagen 1977, Thomasson 1999) make a strict distinction between discourse within fiction, in which statements about literary characters cannot be literally true, and discourse about fiction, as it occurs in literary criticism, where statements about fictional characters can be literally true. Fictional objects are postulated to account for the truth of the latter. This runs into trouble because statements thought to be literally true are not literal. (Yagisawa 2001, Friend 2002) I provide a uniform analysis to account for the truth of statements involving fictional characters by appealing to a presupposition involving a metaphor in both contexts. The presupposition is that there is an x such that x is fictional; x is likened to a real person; and x is and ought to be treated/counted as a real person for all relevant intents and purposes. -/- More generally, I adopt Everett and Schroeder’s (2015) realist view that fictional characters are ideas constituted by mental representations. This, to me, better accounts for how fictional characters are created within the world’s causal nexus (unlike non-spatiotemporal entities in abstractionism), among other things. One key challenge they face is to explain how ideas can possess properties such as being a detective. I present a fine-grained version of their view, according to which the mental representations constituting fictional entities encode mind-dependent properties. Moreover, I explain how reference to such representations is possible, using Bencivenga’s (1983) Neo-Kantian view of reference and Karttunen’s (1976) view on discourse referents. Finally, I suggest that the identity of fictional characters is interest-relative. The constant, and sometimes radical, change of properties that, fictional characters can undergo is taken to be a consequence of the fact that unified mental representations are bundles of simpler mental representations. As change occurs, simpler representations are replaced by others. -/- A key theme that runs through the thesis is that neither fictionality nor pretense is relevant to the semantics of fictional sentences—a claim bolstered by Matravers’ (2014) arguments. Whether or not my account works, this claim, as well as the new philosophical data I bring up, are some of the challenges I pose to the heart of established views. (shrink)

I plot accounts of slurs on a [semanticist – non-semanticist] spectrum, and then I give some original arguments in favor of semanticist approaches. Two core, related pro-semanticist considerations which animate this work are: first, that the pejorative dimension of a slur is non-cancellable; and, second, that ignorance of the pejorative dimension should be counted as ignorance of literal, linguistic meaning, as opposed to a mistake about conditions for appropriate usage. I bolster these considerations via cases in which slurs are embedded (...) within complex constructions, in which cases the pejorative dimension of a slur gets ensnared within the compositional semantic machinery. (shrink)

On scientific and moral revolutions -- Using the dead for the living: the benthamite moral revolution -- Immoralizing and criminalizing abortion: the doctors revolution -- Irredentism and counter-revolutions in geology and abortion -- The american bioethics revolution -- The structure of moral revolutions.

Ripstein's lectures, which constitute the central texts of this book, focus on the two bodies of rules governing war: the jus ad bellum, which regulates resort to armed force, and the jus in bello, which sets forth rules governing the conduct of armed force and applies equally to all parties. The lectures argue that both sets of rules constitute prohibitions rather than permissions, and that recognizing them as distinctive prohibitions can reconcile the seeming tension between them. By understanding that the (...) central wrong of war is that war is the condition which force decides, Ripstein contends that the law and morality of war are in fact aligned; the rules governing the conduct of hostilities must apply equally to parties in the right and parties in the wrong in an armed conflict, because the prohibitions outlined in the rules governing war are prohibitions that restrain war. Ripstein's method of analysis and the substantive argument he puts forward offer an opportunity for rigorous critical engagement in subsequent essays by commentators Hathaway, Kutz, and McMahan, followed by a response from Ripstein. (shrink)

We present a game mechanic called pseudo-visibility for games inhabited by non-player characters (NPCs) driven by reinforcement learning (RL). NPCs are incentivized to pretend they cannot see pseudo-visible players: the training environment simulates an NPC to determine how the NPC would act if the pseudo-visible player were invisible, and penalizes the NPC for acting differently. NPCs are thereby trained to selectively ignore pseudo-visible players, except when they judge that the reaction penalty is an acceptable tradeoff (e.g., a guard might accept (...) the penalty in order to protect a treasure because losing the treasure would hurt even more). We describe an RL agent transformation which allows RL agents that would not otherwise do so to perform some limited self-reflection to learn the training environments in question. (shrink)

This paper traces an expanded ethical perspective for youth and community work (YCW) practice in response to the climate and biodiversity crises. Discussing ecological ethics, we problematise the liberal humanist emphasis on utilitarianism and reject it as inappropriate for YCW in these times. Instead, we argue for an ecocentric practice ethic which intrinsically values the non-human world. To advance an ecocentric ethical perspective for YCW we draw on decolonial and posthuman theory. Inspired by a Freirean dialogical approach, we apply these (...) theoretical domains as lenses to problematise YCW practice, seeking a generative dialogue between perspectives. Through this, we identify three emergent tasks for ecocentric YCW: (a) thinking and acting beyond the individual; (b) cultivating reciprocal care and connection and (c) practicing critical pedagogies of place. This third element builds on YCW's social pedagogic tradition and provides a practical means to incorporate ecocentric ideas into practice. We conclude that, given the unprecedented implications of climate crises and biodiversity collapse, a YCW ethics that does not consider these implications for young people is insufficient for the context of practice today. Enacting an ecocentric YCW ethics requires ongoing collective praxis and dialogue between young people, practitioners, educators, managers and students. (shrink)

A fundamental question asked in modal logic is whether a given theory is consistent. But consistent with what? A typical way to address this question identifies a choice of background knowledge axioms (say, S4, D, etc.) and then shows the assumptions codified by the theory in question to be consistent with those background axioms. But determining the specific choice and division of background axioms is, at least sometimes, little more than tradition. This paper introduces generic theories for propositional modal logic (...) to address consistency results in a more robust way. As building blocks for background knowledge, generic theories provide a standard for categorical determinations of consistency. We argue that the results and methods of this paper help to elucidate problems in epistemology and enjoy sufficient scope and power to have purchase on problems bearing on modalities in judgement, inference, and decision making. (shrink)

This paper has two interconnected goals -- one defensive and fairly conservative, the other more novel and enterprising. The first goal is to defend a broadly Gricean approach to verbal irony from the post-Gricean criticisms which have emerged in the intervening literature --i.e., all things considered, verbal irony is best viewed as one among many species of particularized conversational implicature. The subsequent goal is to work toward developing a significantly original theory of verbal irony, within this Gricean orientation, which aims (...) to take into account and rectify some omissions in and shortcomings of Grice’s very brief published remarks on the topic. (shrink)

This article considers the relationship between utilitarianism and the ethics of Early Buddhism and classical Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism. Section 2 discusses normative ethics. I argue (i) that Early Buddhist ethics is not utilitarian and (ii) that despite the many similarities between utilitarianism and Mahāyāna ethics, it is at best unclear whether Mahāyāna ethics is consequentialist in structure. Section 2 closes by reconstructing the Buddhist understanding of well-being and contrasting it to hedonism. -/- Section 3 focuses on applied ethics. I suggest (...) that two major choice-points for the Buddhist are, first, whether to accept the doctrine of rebirth and, second, whether to adopt a pessimistic or tentatively optimistic reading of Buddhist axiology. I assess the implications of the possible resulting views for various topics in applied ethics, including cause prioritization, global health and poverty, animal welfare, existential risk, space colonization, and human biomedical enhancement, comparing Buddhist answers to contemporary utilitarian positions on these issues. Along the way, I also argue against the pessimistic reading of Buddhist axiology and in favor of a moral-patient-affecting, rather than totalist, understanding of Buddhist population ethics. (shrink)

This study advances understanding of how a normative feminine beauty ideal is maintained through cultural products such as fairy tales. Using Brothers Grimm's fairy tales, the authors explore the extent and ways in which “feminine beauty” is highlighted. Next, they compare those tales that have survived with those that have not to determine whether tales that have been popularized place more emphasis on women's beauty. The findings suggest that feminine beauty is a dominant theme and that tales with heavy emphases (...) on feminine beauty are much more likely to have survived. These findings are interpreted in light of changes in women's social status over the past 150 years and the increased importance of establishing forms of normative social control to maintain a gender system. (shrink)

I am grateful to Micah Gläser, Ryan Liss, and Marcela Prieto Rudolphy for their generous, careful, and provocative engagements with my work. Each of them advances the discussion by proposing modifi...

In Big Gods, Norenzayan (2013) presents the most comprehensive treatment yet of the Big Gods question. The book is a commendable attempt to synthesize the rapidly growing body of survey and experimental research on prosocial effects of religious primes together with cross-cultural data on the distribution of Big Gods. There are, however, a number of problems with the current cross-cultural evidence that weaken support for a causal link between big societies and certain types of Big Gods. Here we attempt to (...) clarify these problems and, in so doing, correct any potential misinterpretation of the cross-cultural findings, provide new insight into the processes generating the patterns observed, and flag directions for future research. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin occupies a distinctive place in both public life and philosophy. In public life, he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and other widely read journals. In philosophy, he has written important and influential works on many of the most prominent issues in legal and political philosophy. In both cases, his interventions have in part shaped the debates he joined. His opposition to Robert Bork's nomination for the United States Supreme Court gave new centrality (...) to debates about the public role of judges and the role of original intent in constitutional interpretation. His writings in legal philosophy have reoriented the modern debate about legal positivism and natural law. In political philosophy, he has shaped the ways in which people debate the nature of equality and has reframed debates about the sanctity of life. (shrink)

A new argument is given for the thesis that only symmetry-invariant physical quantities are real. Non-invariant quantities are dynamically epiphenomenal in that they have no effect on the evolution of invariant quantities, and it is a significant theoretical vice to posit epiphenomenal quantities.