If one were to find a date for the games put on by Pompey to celebrate the opening of his theatre in 55 B.C., it would be possible to assign a more precise date to the delivery of Cicero's speech in Pisonem than seems to have been done so far. Asconius states quite firmly that the in Pisonem was delivered in the second consulship of Pompey and Crassus, a few days before the lavish games celebrating the opening of Pompey's theatre. (...) Asconius rejects a counter-view that the speech was delivered late in the following year. (shrink)

The interplay between emotion and learning is a continuing source of debate and inquiry in organization studies, attracting an increasing number of important contributions. However, a detailed understanding of the interaction between emotion and learning remains elusive. In an effort to extend the existing debate, this article offers an alternative approach that draws on the tradition of pragmatist philosophy, where emotion and learning can both be defined as dynamic processes that emerge in the relational context of social transactions. The mutually (...) constructing interplay between these two processes is then illustrated with an example of a collaborative project in which anxiety, love, guilt, and hostility are all entangled in the learning process. (shrink)

Large-scale genetic databases are being developed in several countries around the world. However, these databases depend on public participation and acquiescence. In the past, information campaigns have been waged and little attention has been paid to dialogue. Nowadays, it is important to include the public in the development of scientific research and to encourage a free, open and useful dialogue among those involved. This paper is a review of community consultation strategies as part of four proposed large-scale genetic databases in (...) Iceland, Estonia, United Kingdom and Quebec. The Iceland Health Sector Database and Estonian Genome Project have followed a “communication approach” in order to address public concerns, whereas, UK Biobank and Quebec CARTaGENE have chosen a “partnership approach” to involve the public in decision-making processes. (shrink)

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 purportedly assures almost all Americans of the right to health insurance coverage. The long-term success of this legislation in improving the public’s health in the United States will likely hinge in no small part on the degree to which statutorily establishing a right to health insurance coverage translates into actual timely, meaningful access to health services, particularly physician services, for specific individuals.

Empowering the elderly to make their own decisions regarding medical care is a noble social, political, and ethical cause; but society must guard against excesses that might ironically, deny the elderly their autonomy by forcing it upon them.

Thirty years ago when I, an attorney, took a tenure-track faculty position at an innovative, newly opened medical school, I was an oddity — truly, a stranger in a strange land. Today it is not uncommon for American medical schools to employ an attorney as a tenured or tenure-track member of its faculty. Over these last three decades, the educational roles and responsibilities of health law faculty who teach in law schools have become increasingly well defined, with numerous health law (...) courses and textbooks now generally accepted as part of the typical law school curriculum. However, the roles and responsibilities of attorney faculty members who teach in medical schools remain less clearly defined and likely are more individualized to the particular medical schools in which they teach. This essay explores some of the challenges and the opportunities which are given to attorney faculty members who teach in medical schools. (shrink)

Thirty years ago when I, an attorney, took a tenure-track faculty position at an innovative, newly opened medical school, I was an oddity — truly, a stranger in a strange land. Today it is not uncommon for American medical schools to employ an attorney as a tenured or tenure-track member of its faculty. Over these last three decades, the educational roles and responsibilities of health law faculty who teach in law schools have become increasingly well defined, with numerous health law (...) courses and textbooks now generally accepted as part of the typical law school curriculum. However, the roles and responsibilities of attorney faculty members who teach in medical schools remain less clearly defined and likely are more individualized to the particular medical schools in which they teach. This essay explores some of the challenges and the opportunities which are given to attorney faculty members who teach in medical schools. (shrink)

BackgroundAccurate reporting on sex and gender in health research is integral to ensuring that health interventions are safe and effective. In Canada and internationally, governments, research organizations, journal editors, and health agencies have called for more inclusive research, provision of sex-disaggregated data, and the integration of sex and gender analysis throughout the research process. Sex and gender analysis is generally defined as an approach for considering how and why different subpopulations (e.g., of diverse genders, ages, and social locations) may experience (...) health conditions and interventions in different or similar ways.The objective of this study was to assess the extent and nature of reporting about sex and/or gender, including whether sex and gender analysis (SGA) was carried out in a sample of Canadian randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with human participants.MethodsWe searched MEDLINE from 01 January 2013 to 23 July 2014 using a validated filter for identification of RCTs, combined with terms related to Canada. Two reviewers screened the search results to identify the first 100 RCTs that were either identified in the trial publication as funded by a Canadian organization or which had a first or last author based in Canada. Data were independently extracted by two people from 10% of the RCTs during an initial training period; once agreement was reached on this sample, the remainder of the data extraction was completed by one person and verified by a second.ResultsThe search yielded 1433 records. We screened 256 records to identify 100 RCTs which met our eligibility criteria. The median sample size of the RCTs was 107 participants (range 12–6085). While 98% of studies described the demographic composition of their participants by sex, only 6% conducted a subgroup analysis across sex and 4% reported sex-disaggregated data. No article defined “sex” and/or “gender.” No publication carried out a comprehensive sex and gender analysis.ConclusionsFindings highlight poor uptake of sex and gender considerations in the Canadian RCT context and underscore the need for better articulated guidance on sex and gender analysis to improve reporting of evidence, inform policy development, and guide future research. (shrink)

Families frequently act as substitute decisionmakers for their older members who suffer from diminished mental capacity to make and express their own medical choices. Substitute decisionmaking takes on particular ethical and legal urgency within the nursing home environment, especially when choices concern potential medical treatment near the end of the nursing home resident's life. This article examines current legal mechanisms in the United States that enable a family to make substitute medical decisions, the ethical underpinnings of those mechanisms, and specific (...) ethical and legal considerations implicated by their application to the nursing home setting. The article offers advice to nursing home professionals, including physicians, in working with families as substitute decisionmakers. (shrink)

In the opening sentence of 2.6, which is of key significance, the meanings or references of are disputed, rendering the whole passage difficult. In the most widely established version, while —‘Evidence for the statement that Athens grew morethan other places because of migration is provided by the following, viz. that...’ This is consistent with taking either Athens or the other places as the subject of the infinitive, ‘Athens grew more’ or ‘the other places grew less’. If recapitulates the end of (...) 2.2, appears to refer to those migrations; but since it is a rare word, abnormal in that sense, and is obscure, Ullrich proposed, which makes a straight reference to migration, disposes of the obscurity, and provides an explicit subject for the infinitive. Gomme accepts this. I disagree, but yet believe that the established version, though capable of much improvement, is the best to date. (shrink)

We propose an experimental method to study the possible emergence of sensemaking in artificial agents. This method involves analyzing the agent's behavior in a test bed environment that presents regularities in the possibilities of interaction afforded to the agent, while the agent has no presuppositions about the underlying functioning of the environment that explains such regularities. We propose a particular environment that permits such an experiment, called the Small Loop Problem. We argue that the agent's behavior demonstrates sensemaking if the (...) agent learns to exploit regularities of interaction to fulfill its self-motivation as if it understood (at least partially) the underlying functioning of the environment. As a corollary, we argue that sensemaking and self-motivation come together. We propose a new method to generate self-motivation in an artificial agent called interactional motivation. An interactionally motivated agent seeks to perform interactions with predefined positive values and avoid.. (shrink)

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives—from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon—contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James (...) Phelan, and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy. (shrink)

If we reject τις, which appears only in derivative manuscripts, then the sentence is notable in the following ways. First, the position of τι—not that it separates ἕκαστος from ὑμν, but because we expect it, if present at all, to appear as πρός ὃ τι … and ἓαστός τι in itself is a conspicuously discordant juxtaposition—hence presumably the corruption to ἓαστός τις. Second, the sense: the sentence must surely mean not that each juryman has a criterion, but that each has (...) a different criterion, that he would like to see satisfied. (shrink)

This paper reports on a mail survey of Jewish nursing homes nationally regarding their compliance with the federal Patient Self-Determination Act that became effective in December, 1991. Data is presented about the extent to which institutions' religious affiliation has influenced their advance directive policies and the procedures they have adopted to implement those policies. A content analysis of written advance directive policies used in Jewish nursing homes is presented also.

In this book, Michael Arbib, a researcher in artificial intelligence and brain theory, joins forces with Mary Hesse, a philosopher of science, to present an integrated account of how humans 'construct' reality through interaction with the social and physical world around them. The book is a major expansion of the Gifford Lectures delivered by the authors at the University of Edinburgh in the autumn of 1983. The authors reconcile a theory of the individual's construction of reality as a network of (...) schemas 'in the head' with an account of the social construction of language, science, ideology and religion to provide an integrated schema-theoretic view of human knowledge. The authors still find scope for lively debate, particularly in their discussion of free will and of the reality of God. The book integrates an accessible exposition of background information with a cumulative marshalling of evidence to address fundamental questions concerning human action in the world and the nature of ultimate reality. (shrink)

In their article “A Broader Understanding of Moral Distress,” Campbell, Ulrich, and Grady (2016) correctly assert that moral distress is well established in the nursing literature and is gaining at...

A recent legal case involving an ambiguous diagnosis in a woman with a severe disorder of consciousness raises pressing questions about treatment withdrawal in a time when much of what experts know about disorders of consciousness is undergoing revision and refinement. How much should diagnostic certainty about consciousness matter? For the judge who refused to allow withdrawal of artificial nutrition and hydration, it was dispositive. Rather than relying on substituted judgment or best interests to determine treatment decisions, he ruled that (...) withdrawal was categorically prohibited, even as he concluded that Hannah Capes was more likely than not in a permanent vegetative state. In many jurisdictions, his decision would likely be consistent with existing law. Evolving technological advances have demonstrated that biologically distinct diagnoses incorporated into state laws may be difficult to establish even under ideal conditions. We offer the Capes case for purposes of examining the consequences of enshrined legal distinctions between permanent vegetative state and other severe disorders of consciousness. Insistence on proof of the permanent absence of consciousness before treatment withdrawal is allowed fails to respect the rights of persons with disorders of consciousness. Even the well-established rights to treatment withdrawal for those in a permanent vegetative state may be in jeopardy if reform is not undertaken. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas famously held that (A) theft is always wrong, and also that (B) it is permissible for a starving man to take the bread he needs, openly or secretly, from another. He reconciled these two positions by claiming that (C) in cases of great need, it is not theft to take someone else’s property when she does not need it herself. On its face, (C) looks like a theoretically costly concession that Aquinas is forced into in order to reconcile (...) (A) and (B). Our first aim is to show that this is not so. We argue that (C) is in fact the only way to accommodate a set of intuitive norms of keeping and taking. Our second aim is to show that (C) has important implications for theories of property more generally: a plausible theory of property must acknowledge a foundational sense of "belong" on which things belong to those who need them. (shrink)

Any philosophical method that treats the analysis of the meaning of a sentence or expression in terms of a decomposition into a set of conceptually basic constituent parts must do some theoretical work to explain the puzzles of intensionality. This is because intensional phenomena appear to violate the principle of compositionality, and the assumption of compositionality is the principal justification for thinking that an analysis will reveal the real semantical import of a sentence or expression through a method of decomposition. (...) Accordingly, a natural strategy for dealing with intensionality is to argue that it is really just an isolable, aberrant class of linguistic phenomena that poses no general threat to the thesis that meaning is basically compositional. On the other hand, the later Mohists give us good reason to reject this view. What we learn from them is that there may be basic limitations in any analytical technique that presupposes that meaning is perspicuously represented only when it has been fully decomposed into its constituent parts. The purpose of this paper is to (a) explain why the Mohists found the issue of intensionality to be so important in their investigations of language, and (b) defend the view that Mohist insights reveal basic limitations in any technique of analysis that is uncritically applied with a decompositional approach in mind, as are those that are often pursued in the West in the context of more general epistemological and metaphysical programs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Current State of Vico ScholarshipDavid L. MarshallGiambattista Vico is one of those chameleon figures in the history of ideas who is so intellectually rich that he can be constantly reinvented. It is indicative of the rich ambiguity of his thought that two of the most prominent intellectual historians working today should have come to opposite conclusions about his relationship to the master-category of eighteenth-century intellectual history: for Mark (...) Lilla, Vico was a Counter-Enlightenment thinker; for Jonathan Israel, he was a figure in the Radical Enlightenment.1 Vico’s fungibility gives reason for pause. Someone who can be folded into all manner of intellectual projects may be suspect. But Vico is more colonizing than colonized and, thus, the diversity of his receptions is evidence of creativity, and not merely malleability. The only way to deal with Vico is to dive into the multiplicity of plausible interpretations and find in them the makings of a new line of inquiry. Vico’s moment of flourishing in the Anglophone world came initially in the 1960s and 1970s, but if the diversity and quality of receptions in the last five years is anything to go by then we can say that Vico remains—especially in Italian, French, and German— an intellectual historical provocateur.This review essay surveys such literature and makes a single recurring observation: the various specifications of Vico’s place in intellectual history come into alignment as dimensions of what one might term Vico’s reinvention of rhetoric. As a professor of rhetoric in a culture that possessed—for [End Page 141] the most part—very weak oratorical institutions, Vico found himself in a particularly paradoxical situation. Recent research on Vico suggests that this paradox worked itself out in Vico’s thought in a number of highly interesting ways. First, Vico constitutes an opportunity for intellectual historians of the scientific revolution by offering a simultaneously rhetorical and pragmatic gloss of the early modern logic of experiment. Second, for intellectual historians of religion, Vico constitutes a study in how early moderns could examine the rhetorical functioning of theological vocabularies without necessarily committing themselves to the independent existence of the referents of those vocabularies. Third, for intellectual historians of Enlightenment, Vico confirms that encyclopedism was not a merely French practice in the eighteenth century and that the kind of omnicompetence implicit in encyclopedic multidisciplinarity had roots in rhetorical criticism. Fourth, intellectual historians of Counter-Enlightenment cannot easily fold Vico into their narratives, in part because his legal works (which have been read as a call for cultural retrenchment in response to early modern skepticism) are in fact an account of how Greek rhetoric found its analogue in Roman jurisprudence. Fifth, for historians of the idea of language, Vico demonstrates that there were powerful alternatives in early modernity to the dominant contractualist account of the origin of language (offered by Hobbes, Locke, and others) that were rhetorical and yet did not emphasize the priority of speech over writing.When it appeared in 1961, Nicola Badaloni’s Introduzione a G.B. Vico was the most sophisticated attempt to locate Vico in the Neapolitan philosophical tradition. In many ways, it remains the best attempt at contextualizing a thinker who is notoriously difficult to situate among his contemporaries. John Robertson’s recent Case for the Enlightenment has many virtues (not least its revealing supposition that Vico ought to be read alongside Hume), but as an attempt at contextualization Robertson’s work is not as rich as Badaloni’s.2 In particular, Badaloni did a great deal to reconstruct the history of natural philosophical inquiry at Naples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Badaloni’s description, Naples was a place in which a strong culture of natural philosophical investigation set the foundation for concepts such as experimentalism and pantheism. Furthermore, Badaloni argued that, although such concepts originated in natural philosophy, they cross-pollinated with ideas prominent in the Neapolitan schools of jurisprudence—particularly probabilism. In the [End Page 142] broadest terms, Badaloni argued that Vico’s intellectual project was an examination of the pantheistic principle that Jovis omnia plena (“all things are made of Jove”) in the domains of law, poetry, and history... (shrink)

Many families worldwide have at least one member with a behavioral or mental disorder, and yet the majority of the public fails to correctly recognize symptoms of mental illness. Previous research has found that Mental Health Literacy (MHL)—the knowledge and positive beliefs about mental disorders—tends to be higher in European and North American cultures, compared to Asian and African cultures. Nonetheless quantitative research examining the variables that explain this cultural difference remains limited. The purpose of our study was fourfold: (a) (...) to validate measures of MHL cross-culturally, (b) to examine the MHL model quantitatively, (c) to investigate cultural differences in the MHL model, and (d) to examine collectivism as a predictor of MHL. We validated measures of MHL in European American and Indian samples. The results lend strong quantitative support to the MHL model. Recognition of symptoms of mental illness was a central variable: greater recognition predicted greater endorsement of social causes of mental illness and endorsement of professional help-seeking as well as lesser endorsement of lay help-seeking. The MHL model also showed an overwhelming cultural difference; namely, lay help-seeking beliefs played a central role in the Indian sample, and a negligible role in the European American sample. Further, collectivism was positively associated with causal beliefs of mental illness in the European American sample, and with lay help-seeking beliefs in the Indian sample. These findings demonstrate the importance of understanding cultural differences in beliefs about mental illness, particularly in relation to help-seeking beliefs. (shrink)

This text was originally delivered as the Marshall Lectures in Cambridge in 1967-1968 and one would expect that Alfred Marshall, the great economist of the liberal tradition, would come off the better in comparison with Karl Marx. The expectation is not disappointed, but in the end Kerr finds both Marshall and Marx equally irrelevant to the problems of the contemporary world. The liberalism and socialism which helped shape the modern world now stand historically exhausted. The formative influence (...) in the world is no longer the struggle between classes or between socialism and capitalism. The struggle now is within one pluralistic world, whose industrial nature embraces the socialist as well as the capitalist sectors. The nature of the struggle is no longer for the possession of property, but for power--power to set the rules, fix the rewards, and influence the style of life. Those who engage in the struggle are not economic classes, but social groups and individuals. There is a challenge to the whole society, but by its very nature it cannot succeed. The challenge comes from the under-class and from the outer-class. All other elements, including the workers, the managers, leaders, white-collar employees and self-employed, make up the inner-class and conduct the struggle for power within the framework of acceptance of the existing social order. The two points to emphasize here are that the under-class and outer-class do not have the combined strength to win out, except with the support of some dominant groups of the inner-class--a fairly hopeless prospect. Secondly, no group can win conclusively, since authority in a highly industrialized society can never be held equally by all, or entirely by one. We can only conclude from Kerr's exposition that mankind is forever stuck with what Hegel called a "bad infinity." Post-capitalism and post-socialism have no place to go and a new "end of history" has been attained. Kerr concludes wistfully that we "can only envy the optimism of Marx and Marshall that surround their views of the evolution of the working class."--H. B. (shrink)

One of the primary concerns of the Consolatio is to draw out many of the paradoxical conclusions concerning the relation between creation and God that stem from the premises of classical creationist metaphysics, and attempt to solve them. Once one accepts that God does exist, is omnipotent, omniscient, and simple, it becomes viciously difficult to explain: (1) how anything contrary to God’s will—evil—can exist; (2) how any cause can act independently of God’s will—human freedom; and (3) how “independent causes” can (...) relate to God through their own agency—human prayer. This naturally begs the question: why should we accept the premises of classical creationist metaphysics? This paper addresses this question by analyzing and defending two of the central premises of Boethius’s version of classical creationist metaphysics as they are addressed in Consolatio III,10: (a) that God exists, and (b) that God is simple. (shrink)

We should not investigate facts by the light of arguments, but arguments by the light of facts.Myson of Chen, one of the Seven Sages ca. 600 B.C.To settle scores as well as problems, to shake things up, to make people think about what they said and wrote, to be provocative without being unjust...Kingsley AmisIn their critique of Wisconsin's revised child protection Statute, Kenneth De Ville and Loretta Kopelman argue rightly that “words matter.” Word mongering infects most political dialogue and is (...) nowhere more virulent than in the American abortion debate. Dichotomies such as “ unborn child” and “fetus,” expectant mother” and “pregnant woman,” “anti-choice’’ and “pro-choice,” “pregnancy termination” and “murder” symbolize the polarity of the abortion argument and the importance of language as a powerful conceptual weapon. The debate over reproductive rights is a war often fought on a linguistic battlefield. There, combatants forgo rules of engagement. Mal-intentioned illiteracy, ranging from the puerile to the vituperative, is always strategic. (shrink)

Within the discipline of American political science and the field of political theory, African American prophetic political critique as a form of political theorizing has been largely neglected. Stephen Marshall, in The City on the Hill from Below, interrogates the political thought of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison to reveal a vital tradition of American political theorizing and engagement with an American political imaginary forged by the City on the Hill. Originally (...) articulated to describe colonial settlement, state formation, and national consolidation, the image of the City on the Hill has been transformed into one richly suited to assessing and transforming American political evil. The City on the Hill from Below shows how African American political thinkers appropriated and revised languages of biblical prophecy and American republicanism. (shrink)

The paper deals with pp formulas in the language of reduced special groups, and the question of when the validity of a pp formula on each finite subspace of a space of orderings implies its global validity [18]. A large new class of pp formulas is introduced for which this is always the case, assuming the space of orderings in question has finite stability index. The paper also considers pp formulas of the special type $b\in \Pi _{i=1}^{n}\,D\langle 1,a_{i}\rangle $. Formulas (...) of this type with n = 3 are the simplest sort of pp formula not covered by the result, and are also the source of the recent counterexamples in [9] and [19]. (shrink)

In J. B. Schneewind's The Invention of Autonomy we are given a monumental history of moral philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a history more comprehensive and richer in detail than one would have thought possible in a single volume. Though the daunting erudition, agreeably unobtrusive, inspires confidence, it is Schneewind's gift of narrative that makes his book such a pleasure and his story so compelling. Schneewind originally conceived the book, he tells us, to "broaden our historical comprehension of (...) Kant's moral philosophy by relating it to the earlier work to which it was a response", but he does much, much more as he charts the fitful transition from morality as obedience to the later and now widely accepted conception of morality as self-governance. In its broad outline, the story is familiar, beginning with Montaigne's skepticism, moving through modern natural law theory, rationalist, perfectionist, and moral sense responses and ending with Bentham and Kant. But Schneewind adds to acute and deeply informed discussions of Hobbes, Locke, Clarke, Hume, and Kant, clear, often arresting summaries, in varying degrees of detail, of Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Machiavelli, Suarez, Charron, Grotius, Cumberland, Pufendorf, Thomasius, DuVair, Justus Lipsius, Herbert of Cherbury, Descartes, Gassendi, Whichcote, John Smith, More, Cudworth, Spinoza, Leibniz, Barbeyrac, Malebranche, Nicole, Bayle, Harrington, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Butler, Price, Adam Smith, Reid, Paley, Hartley, Helvetius, d'Holbach, Bentham, de Sade, Wolff, Crusius, Voltaire, La Mettrie, Diderot, Rousseau, and others. If, as no doubt they will, some readers will fault some of Schneewind's interpretations, none will fail to admire his achievement in ferreting out and combining in such a fascinating narrative the leading ideas of this host of thinkers. It is safe to predict, moreover, that this study will inspire others to explore some of these less-read authors and to produce more fine-grained monographs, and further to deepen our understanding of the period and of the way we have come to think of ourselves. (shrink)

Arguments about constitutional and personal rights often invoke the concept of privacy. In the United States it has been said that the constitution "embodies a promise that a certain private sphere of individual liberty will be kept largely beyond the reach of government". A number of formulae has been invoked in an attempt to define the sphere of constitutional privacy. They include: Fundamental rights of interests; personal decisions and issues; important questions intimately affecting private lives; and decisions affecting education, child-rearing, (...) marriage and contraception.Canadian and Europian courts have resorted to balancing formulae and to proportionality to set the limits to liberty guarantees. All of them need, however, an implied general theory of liberty such as that propounded by Mill , since privacy is a special sub-category of liberty.Privacy claims are made not only against the State, but in tort law relations between individuals, or between individuals and organisations such as the Press. Proposals for legislation to protect personal privacy encompass two different types of claim. One relates to physical intrusion: the other to proprietary rights over information of certain kinds. It is questionable whether general legislation to establish a statutory tort of breach of privacy is defensible. It may even be dangerous and be exploitable to protect government information. A public interest defence is essential. That throws the balancing role back on the courts, but they cannot rely on any obvious social consensus in weighing the interests at issue. In der Auseinandersetzung über subjektive Rechte, die von einer Verfassung garantiert sind oder deren Verletzung privatrechtliche Ansprüche auslöst, berufen sich viele Stimmen auf das Konzept der Privatsphäre. Nach einer in den Vereinigten Staaten vertretenen These liegt der amerikanischen Verfassung "das Versprechen zugrunde, daß die Privatsphäre, d.i. eine bestimmte Sphäre individueller Freiheit, im großen und ganzen außerhalb des Zugriffs des Staates liegt". Wie läßt sich rechtlich präzisieren, was diese verfassungsrechtlich garantierte Privatsphäre eigentlich einschließt? Eine Reihe von Antworten, die auf diese Frage gegeben werden, bezeichnen als vom Begriff der Privatsphäre erfaßt a) fundamentale Rechte oder Interessen, b) persönliche Probleme oder Entscheidungen, c) wesentliche Fragen, die das Privatleben ganz existenziell berühren, d) Entscheidungen, die die Erziehung und Ausbildung von Kindern, Empfängnisverhütung und Eheschließung betreffen. Einige dieser Formeln enthalten Elemente eines logischen Zirkels, da sie bei dem Versuch, die Privatsphäre näher zu umschreiben, ihrerseits selbst den Ausdruck "privat" benutzen. Andere sind entweder offensichtlich zu weit oder zu eng oder sonst schlechterdings ungenügend. Darüber hinaus ist es nicht klar, wann bei den subjektiven Rechten, die als fundamental bezeichnet werden, Ausnahmen gemacht werden. Ein Beispiel liefert die US-amerikanische Entscheidung Bowers v. Hardwick. (shrink)

In 'on the analysis of causation' ("synthese", Volume 21, 1970), We argued that any analysis of causation entailing that "a" caused "b" only if "a" is the set of conditions necessary and sufficient for "b" yields a formal contradiction. In 'causal necessity and logical necessity' ("philosophical studies", Volume 28, 1975), David sanford objects to that argument, Concentrating his attack on the notions of causal necessity and total sets of antecedent conditions. We reply in this paper that, Although sanford's objections help (...) clarify the issues, They are not telling. (shrink)

Each Local Research Ethics Committee (LREC) is expected to produce an annual report for its establishing authority. Reports from 145 LRECs were examined with regard to (a) whether the committees were working within the terms of the most recent guidelines from the Department of Health and (b) observations on the role of LRECs with particular reference to accountability. Most LRECs had produced a report, although their length varied greatly. Most reports showed how seriously the committee took its task. Most committees (...) met many of the guidelines; for example, almost all had two or more lay-members. The guideline most frequently not met was that committees should have no more than 12 members. Many committees review very large numbers of projects (maximum 351). Approximately two-thirds provide details in the annual report of individual project titles, their author and the committee decision; all reports should contain this information. Although it may in fact happen more generally, only 23 per cent of the reports referred to any form of monitoring of the eventual outcome of the research. A significant issue to arise from the reports is the extent to which the framework for the operation of LRECs has been confused by the development of the purchaser-provider split. The paper concludes with suggestions for remedying the situation. (shrink)