From 1995 to 1998, the European Commission supported the “Basic Ethical Principles in European Bioethics and Biolaw” research project. The project was based on cooperation between 22 partners coming from most EU countries. Its aim was to identify the ethical principles relating to autonomy, dignity, integrity and vulnerability as four important ideas or values for a European bioethics and biolaw. An important resume of the BIOMED project was the partner’s Policy Proposals to the European Commission, the Barcelona (...) Declaration of 1998, which is unique as a philosophical and political agreement between experts in bioethics and biolaw from many different countries. In this article, we want to compare the Barcelona Declaration with some other recent international Documents on bioethics and biolaw. We will relate the Barcelona Declaration to the framework of different international documents and codes of conduct about bioethics and biolaw. In particular, we will look at the similarities and differences when compared with the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection on of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine, adopted by the Committee of Ministers in 1996. Moreover, we will look at The UNESCO Declaration on the Humane Genome from 1997. Thus, the Barcelona Declaration does not only represent European ethical principles for bioethics and biolaw, but the document should also be conceived as a conceptual clarification and articulation of major ethical principles, which are central to international concerns for a universal bioethics and biolaw. (shrink)

This article summarizes some of the results of the BIOMED II project “Basic Ethical Principles in European Bioethics and Biolaw” connected to a research project of the Danish Research Councils “Bioethics and Law”. The BIOMED project was based on cooperation between 22 partners in most EU countries. The aim of the project was to identify the ethical principles of respect for autonomy, dignity, integrity and vulnerability as four important ideas or values for a European bioethics and biolaw. The (...) research concluded that the basic ethical principles cannot be understood as universal everlasting ideas or transcendental truths but they rather function reflective guidelines and important values in European culture. The method of the research was conceptual, philosophical analysis of the cultural background of the four values or normative ideas that people use and find important in their existence. Moreover, this was combined with analysis of empirical legal material and policy documents. Also, a number of qualitative interviews with relevant experts were carried out. Another important result of the BIOMED project was the partner's Policy Proposals to the European Commission, the Barcelona Declaration, unique as a philosophical and political agreement between experts in bioethics and biolaw from many different countries. The Policy Proposals are reprinted here at the end of the article. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to formulate some questions about a concept, justice, and some of its theoretical problems. When we discuss social and distributive justice, we are not simply pointing to a "state" problem. Justice is a challenge that is incumbent to every human being and, therefore, to everyone, in this era that is undoubtedly that of globalized capitalism. Taking into consideration congress emphasis on exploring dimensions of the human and inquiring into the challenges facing humanity, and our (...) need for global discussions about the values and concepts of development, values and human concerns, trying to find out what concepts might be essential, I think that one of those essential concepts is justice. But the problem begins from its very definition – justice is a concept that, from its root, is indeterminate. Justice comprises multiple meanings: it refers to a human capacity, an ideal and an essential element in social institutions, as well as a double but, at the same time, a singular dimension, individual and sociopolitical. My pretension is to explore some meanings of justice opening a dialogical perspective, believing that this is a fertile way to consider actual world challenges. Part of: Paper - 24th World Congress of Philosophy, FISP (Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie), Peking University. Beijing (People's Republic of China) 13/08/2018. (shrink)

A partir de la divergencia de M. Foucault con Th. Hobbes con respecto a la guerra como principio y fundamento del poder, se muestra la importancia de esa diferencia conceptual para los análisis políticos contemporáneos. Foucault sostiene que, en las sociedades modernas de Occidente, la comunidad política, y más precisamente la política misma, ha sido el terreno de la guerra librada por otros medios. Por extensión, esta tesis significa invertir el principio de von Clausewitz; a saber, que la guerra es (...) la continuación de la política por otros medios. On the basis of the difference between M. Foucault and Th. Hobbes regarding war as a principle and foundation of power, the article shows the importance of this conceptual difference for contemporary political analyses. Foucault argues that in modern Western societies, the political community and, more specifically, politics itself, has been the space of a war waged by other means. By extension, this thesis entails the inversion of von Clausewitz's principle, namely, that war is the continuation of politics by other means. A partir da divergência de M. Foucault com Th. Hobbes sobre a guerra como princípio e fundamento do poder, mostra-se a importância dessa diferença conceitual para as análises políticas contemporâneas. Foucault sustenta que, nas sociedades modernas do Ocidente, a comunidade política, e mais precisamente a política em si, tem sido o terreno da guerra travada por outros meios. Por extensão, esta tese significa inverter o princípio de von Clausewitz; a saber, que a guerra é a continuação da política por outros meios. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy is beginning to pay to problems of linguistic justice the attention that they deserve in today’s heavily interconnected world. However, contemporary philosophy, as a part of today’s world, has problems of linguistic justice of its own which deserve meta-philosophical attention. At least in the philosophical tradition that is mainstream in much of the world today, viz. analytic philosophy, methodological and sociological mechanisms make it the case that the voices of non-native-speaking philosophers are substantially less heard. In this essay, (...) I briefly outline the problems non-native speakers face in contemporary analytic philosophy. I then move on to analysing the possible causes of the current problems. Among these reasons, I argue, is the emphasis given to linguistic style and appearances as signs of clarity, precision and rigour in the treatment of philosophical problems. I argue that the current emphasis on linguistic style in analytic philosophy is not justifiable, in part because it deprives contemporary analytic philosophy of a wider variety of philosophical perspectives. I argue that an important remedy for the emphasis on linguistic appearances within philosophy is to foster greater linguistic diversity. I conclude by presenting and motivating a recent initiative that aims to achieve such a goal. (shrink)

English continues to rise as the lingua franca of academic philosophy. Philosophers from all types of linguistic backgrounds use it to communicate with each other across the globe. In this paper, we identify how the rise of English leads to linguistic injustices. We argue that these injustices are similar in an important regard: they are all instances of distributive epistemic injustice. We then present six proposals for addressing unjust linguistic discrimination and evaluate them on how well they can mitigate the (...) specific types of distributive epistemic injustice that we identify. We accept that there is much more to be said. But we hope that what we say will motivate other philosophers to take these types of injustices more seriously and encourage them to make academic philosophy a more inclusive global community. (shrink)

Although metaphysics as a discipline can hardly be separated from Aristotle and his works, the questions it raises were certainly known to authors even before the reception of Aristotle in the thirteenth century. Even without the explicit use of this term the twelfth century manifested a strong interest in metaphysical questions under the guise of «natural philosophy» or «divine science», leading M.-D. Chenu to coin the expression of a twelfth century «éveil métaphysique». In their commentaries on Boethius and under the (...) influence of Neoplatonism, twelfth century authors not only anticipate essential elements of thirteenth century metaphysics, they also make an original contribution to the history of metaphysics by attempting to integrate the theory of first principles, philosophical theology and ontology. This volume presents and examines the contributions of the twelfth century to metaphysics made by selected Jewish, Christian and Muslim authors of the Iberian Peninsula and Francia. -/- Contributors include Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (Frankfurt am Main), Andreas Speer (Würzburg), Charles Burnett (London), Alexander Fidora (Frankfurt am Main), Thomas Ricklin (Neuchâtel), Yossef Schwartz (Jerusalem), Josep Udina (Barcelona), Jack C. Marler (St. Louis/USA), Gillian R. Evans (Cambridge), Andreas Niederberger (Frankfurt am Main) and Françoise Hudry (Paris). (shrink)

Since last year, major initiatives have been undertaken by the chair of theoretical philosophy at the University of Tübingen in order to enhance the reception of analytic metaphysics in the European landscape. Here we review the 2013 summer workshop, intended to be the first of an annual series, on “Existence, Truth and Fundamentality”, the invited speakers being Graham Priest (Melbourne), Stephan Leuenberger (Glasgow), Dan López de Sa (Barcelona), Francesco Berto (Aberdeen), Friederike Moltmann (Paris – Pantheon Sorbonne) and Jason Turner (...) (Leeds). The workshop’s scope is fairly large, focusing on three different aspects of contemporary research in metaphysics. However, the underlying idea of organizers Thomas Sattig and Alessandro Torza consisted in exploring their interconnections and even new areas which possibly share the same problem spectrum. Also, they thought of bringing together both young and senior protagonists of the contemporary debate. In this sense, the main thread followed by the speakers consisted in enquiring the ideas of fundamentality, dependence and grounding with respect to ontology (Berto, López de Sa, Turner) and the truthmaking debate (Priest, Moltmann, Leuenberger), thus pretty much in line with some latest tendencies in metaphysics, such as, prima inter paria, the works of Kit Fine. When we say that something is more fundamental than something else, we move into a non-conventional (for the standards of 20 th century philosophy) metodological framework, hardly focusing on the question about what there is, and rather tackling the issue of how fundamentally there is what there is, or how the existence of something is required as a ground for the existence of other things. Here is how Jonathan Schaffer explains the methodological transition in his influential “On What Grounds What” (2009): -/- Among the many assumptions Quine and Carnap share is that metaphysical questions are existence questions, such as whether numbers exist. They only disagree on the further issue of whether such questions are meaningful (at least as the metaphysician might pose them). But why think that metaphysical questions are existence question of this sort? Return to Aristotle’s Metaphysics. There are virtually no existence question posed. The whole discussion is about substances (fundamental units of being). At one point Aristotle pauses to ask if numbers exist, and his answer is a brief and dismissive yes. [. . . ] For Aristotle, the question about numbers is whether they are transcendent substances or grounded in concreta. The question is not whether numbers exist, but how. (Schaffer, 2009, p. 347) -/- The conference opened with Graham Priest’s intriguing and peculiar review of Buddhist cornerstone “The Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way” (Mūlamadhyakamakārikā) by Nāgārjuna (ca. 150-ca. 250 AD), seen as a unrecognized forerunner of multi-valued semantics and dialetheism. Priest shows that Nagarjuna’s thought indeed has valuable analytic grip (contrary to the traditional mystical dismiss of his works altogether) and is even in accord to some formal schemas rejecting both the laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction. Dan López de Sa was interested in the topic of grounding, raising concerns about how to explain the kind of “reality” exemplified by what is not fundamental, but rather derivative on something else. He proposes a conceptual and non-primitive analysis of grounding as linked to fundamentality and derivation, and argues that the view can be advocated along with the acceptance that at least something is not fundamental. Subsequently, he illustrates an impressive range of applications linked to contemporary debates in meta-ontology, truthmaking and philosophy of time. Stephan Leuenberger discussed a semantics for “total logic”, a variant of first order logic which is claimed to have several applications with respect to the issue of excluding negative existentials from the scope of theories accounting for a given ’totality’ of facts. For example, materialism is the claim that everything there is can be traced back to physical facts or to truth implied by those facts. What about the claim that “There are no angels”? According to Leuenberger, ordinary logic falls prey of modal arguments (if it is possible that there are angels, by modus tollens, that it is not metaphysically necessary that everything there is is physical). So, there is space for the introduction of a new operator, the totality operator, claiming of what enters its scope that “that’s the whole truth”. Consequently, total logic’s semantics tackles David Chalmers’ well-known conceivability-based argument in favour of zombie’s (subjects producing behaviour but experiencing no qualia) possible existence. Friederike Moltmann presented a massive array of natural language-based examples on the role played by case-constructions, such as “it is the case that Caesar crossed the Rubicon”, “the case of the stolen statue”, “the case in which it might rain”, and so forth. She suggests that we should take surface phenomena of our language very seriously with regard to the determination of ontological categories and truth-makers. Cases are provided by many natural languages with their own existence predicates (“to occur” and “to present itself ”), and these do not apply to other kind of entities, such as objects and events. Trying to derive a substantive thesis on their nature, she claims that they are filtered entities, a structure taking into account some features of the corresponding objects and events and preserving their relational pattern. Jason Turner discussed meta-ontological concerns against the claim that ontological debates are defective. Analysed the structure of a metaphysical theory and identified two different forms of defectiveness that can occur in ontological questions, the defection from without and the defection from within, the author provided an original solution in order to avoid such difficulties. He argued thus in favor of a logical constancy, a translation principle thanks to it would be possible reconceive an ontological defection. Lastly, Francesco Berto’s talk closed the workshop with a sagacious discussion of meinongian quantification. He substains that Meinongians and Quineans experience no conceptual equivocation. Even if the former claims that “There are things that do not exist”, something that the latter contrasts with the interpretation of existential quantifiers as all-including, they still rely upon the same concept of “existence” and they understand each other when they are outside the ontology room, so that it cannot be that they lack competence. Subsequently, Berto deals with the objection that Meinongians commit analytic falsehood in separating the meaning of “to be” from that of “exists”. The Quinean has no independent evidence for analytic equivalence aside from her emphatic stress on the “is” in “there is”. Meinongians, however, can retort to linguistic considerations and claim that existence predicates display fairly different functions. -/- As for what regards our internal division of the “philosophical labor”, Fabio Ceravolo reviewed Moltmann and Berto’s talks; whereas Mattia Cozzi took care of Priest’s and Leuenberger’s, and Mattia Sorgon of those given by López de Sa and Turner. Conclusively, we would like to thank Thomas Sattig and Alessandro Torza for all of their organizational efforts and the kind welcome they reserved to us. We hope we will have further opportunities to collaborate with Tübingen in supporting similarly innovative and valiant european initiatives. (shrink)

Seeing is a matter of perspective. A perspective is the vantage point by which we view the reality or the world around us. That is why it is called a worldview or paradigm. In other words, what we see is a by product of how we look at the reality around us based on our idea and image of ourselves. Thus, a philosopher once said that if a bird is given the necessary intelligence and the faculty to express its idea (...) of God it will speak of a God that majestically sings and flies with His mighty wings. (shrink)

The presence of stigmatizing language in the electronic health record (EHR) has been used to measure implicit biases that underlie health inequities. The purpose of this study was to identify the presence of stigmatizing language in the clinical notes of pregnant people during the birth admission. We conducted a qualitative analysis on N = 1117 birth admission EHR notes from two urban hospitals in 2017. We identified stigmatizing language categories, such as Disapproval (39.3%), Questioning patient credibility (37.7%), Difficult patient (21.3%), (...) Stereotyping (1.6%), and Unilateral decisions (1.6%) in 61 notes (5.4%). We also defined a new stigmatizing language category indicating Power/privilege. This was present in 37 notes (3.3%) and signaled approval of social status, upholding a hierarchy of bias. The stigmatizing language was most frequently identified in birth admission triage notes (16%) and least frequently in social work initial assessments (13.7%). We found that clinicians from various disciplines recorded stigmatizing language in the medical records of birthing people. This language was used to question birthing people's credibility and convey disapproval of decision‐making abilities for themselves or their newborns. We reported a Power/privilege language bias in the inconsistent documentation of traits considered favorable for patient outcomes (e.g., employment status). Future work on stigmatizing language may inform tailored interventions to improve perinatal outcomes for all birthing people and their families. (shrink)

Nurses working or living near a community disaster have the opportunity to study health‐related consequences to disaster or disaster recovery. In such a situation, the researchers need to deal with the conceptual and methodological issues unique to postdisaster research and know what resources are available to guide them, even if they have no specialized training or previous experience in disaster research. The purpose of this article is to review issues and challenges associated with conducting postdisaster research and encourage nurses to (...) seek resources and seize opportunities to conduct research should the situation arise. Current disaster studies and the authors' personal experiences conducting maternal‐child research in post‐Katrina New Orleans (2005–2013) provide real‐life examples of how health professionals and nurses faced the challenges of doing postdisaster research. After catastrophic events, nurses need to step forward to conduct disaster research that informs and improves future disaster planning and healthcare responses. (shrink)

Over 40 years of research have shown that traumatic brain injury affects brain volume. However, technical and practical limitations made it difficult to detect brain volume abnormalities in patients suffering from chronic effects of mild or moderate traumatic brain injury. This situation improved in 2006 with the FDA clearance of NeuroQuant®, a commercially available, computer-automated software program for measuring MRI brain volume in human subjects. More recent strides were made with the introduction of NeuroGage®, commercially available software that is based (...) on NeuroQuant® and extends its utility in several ways. Studies using these and similar methods have found that most patients with chronic mild or moderate traumatic brain injury have brain volume abnormalities, and several of these studies found—surprisingly—more abnormal enlargement than atrophy. More generally, 102 peer-reviewed studies have supported the reliability and validity of NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage®. Furthermore, this updated version of a previous review addresses whether NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage® meet the Daubert standard for admissibility in court. It concludes that NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage® meet the Daubert standard based on their reliability, validity, and objectivity. Due to the improvements in technology over the years, these brain volumetric techniques are practical and readily available for clinical or forensic use, and thus they are important tools for detecting signs of brain injury. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

I argue that, despite van Inwagen’s pessimism about the task, it is worth looking for answers to his General Composition Question. Such answers or ‘principles of composition’ tell us about the relationship between an object and its parts. I compare principles of composition with criteria of identity, arguing that, just as different sorts of thing satisfy different criteria of identity, they may satisfy different principles of composition. Variety in criteria of identity is not taken to reflect ontological (...) variety in the identity relation; I discuss whether variety in principles of composition should be taken to reflect ontological variety in the composition relation. (shrink)

Outlining the major competing theories in the history of political and moral philosophy--from Locke and Hume through Hart, Rawls, and Nozick--John Simmons attempts to understand and solve the ancient problem of political obligation. Under what conditions and for what reasons, he asks, are we morally bound to obey the law and support the political institutions of our countries?

Discussions of free will have frequently centered on principles concerning ability, control, unavoidability and other practical modalities. Some assert the closure of the latter over various propositional operations and relations, for example, that the consequences of what is beyond one's control are themselves beyond one's control.1 This principle has been featured in the unavoidability argument for incompatibilism: if everything we do is determined by factors which are not under our control, then, by the principle, we are unable to act (...) and choose other than we actually did. A second family of principles concerns the fixity of the past and the laws of nature. If no one is able to alter the past or violate the laws it seems but a small step to conclude that no one can do anything such that if they did it then the past would be altered or the laws violated. Accordingly, if an agent's performing an act is necessitated by the past and laws, then the agent is unable to refrain from that act at that time. Generalizing, determinism precludes anyone from doing anything other than what he or she did.2. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

We list, with discussions, various principles of scientific realism, in order to exhibit their diversity and to emphasize certain serious problems of formulation. Ontological and epistemological principles are distinguished. Within the former category, some framed in semantic terms (truth, reference) serve their purpose vis-a-vis instrumentalism (Part 1). They fail, however, to distinguish the realist from a wide variety of (constructional) empiricists. Part 2 seeks purely ontological formulations, so devised that the empiricist cannot reconstruct them from within. The main (...) task here is to characterize "independence of mind". A pair of notions, "physical invariance" and "anti-determination", seem to work. They enable us to assess anew "the problem of constructing the physical out of the phenomenal" (yielding certain clarifications demanded by Goodman). Modern cosmology, especially, is seen to present insuperable obstacles to such empiricist approaches to science. The final section on epistemological principles reveals a morass better avoided in favor of an elementary claim about perception, together with a rejection of any absolute observation/theory dichotomy. Finally, a positive, realist notion of "observable-in-principle" is sketched, and it is suggested that, from the perspective of relativistic cosmology, even this defines no boundary to potential knowledge. (shrink)

Many recent writers in the philosophy of mathematics have put great weight on the relative categoricity of the traditional axiomatizations of our foundational theories of arithmetic and set theory. Another great enterprise in contemporary philosophy of mathematics has been Wright's and Hale's project of founding mathematics on abstraction principles. In earlier work, it was noted that one traditional abstraction principle, namely Hume's Principle, had a certain relative categoricity property, which here we term natural relative categoricity. In this paper, we (...) show that most other abstraction principles are not naturally relatively categorical, so that there is in fact a large amount of incompatibility between these two recent trends in contemporary philosophy of mathematics. To better understand the precise demands of relative categoricity in the context of abstraction principles, we compare and contrast these constraints to stability-like acceptability criteria on abstraction principles, the Tarski-Sher logicality requirements on abstraction principles studied by Antonelli and Fine, and supervaluational ideas coming out of Hodes' work. (shrink)

The American Institute of certified public accountants (AICPA) has promulgated a Code of Professional Conduct , which has served as the primary ethical standard for public accountants in the United States for more than 20 years. It is now out of date and needs to be replaced with a code of ethics. Just as U.S. generally accepted accounting principles are being migrated toward “principles-based accounting” as part of a convergence with international financial reporting standards, a similar process needs (...) to occur with ethics. This article organizes the primary rules of the AICPA Code around five essential virtues: objectivity, integrity, inquisitiveness, loyalty, and trustworthiness. These virtues correspond to the general principles set forth in the Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants of the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC). From this virtue ethics perspective, various rules of the AICPA Code are critiqued as being inadequate at best, and poorly crafted at worst. The article concludes with the proposition that principles-based ethics serves the profession and the financial reporting process better than the current rules-based approach. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

We investigate the complexity of various combinatorial theorems about linear and partial orders, from the points of view of computability theory and reverse mathematics. We focus in particular on the principles ADS (Ascending or Descending Sequence), which states that every infinite linear order has either an infinite descending sequence or an infinite ascending sequence, and CAC (Chain-AntiChain), which states that every infinite partial order has either an infinite chain or an infinite antichain. It is well-known that Ramsey's Theorem for (...) pairs (RT₂²) splits into a stable version (SRT₂²) and a cohesive principle (COH). We show that the same is true of ADS and CAC, and that in their cases the stable versions are strictly weaker than the full ones (which is not known to be the case for RT₂² and SRT₂²). We also analyze the relationships between these principles and other systems and principles previously studied by reverse mathematics, such as WKL₀, DNR, and BΣ₂. We show, for instance, that WKL₀ is incomparable with all of the systems we study. We also prove computability-theoretic and conservation results for them. Among these results are a strengthening of the fact, proved by Cholak, Jockusch, and Slaman, that COH is Π₁¹-conservative over the base system RCA₀. We also prove that CAC does not imply DNR which, combined with a recent result of Hirschfeldt, Jockusch, Kjos-Hanssen, Lempp, and Slaman, shows that CAC does not imply SRT₂² (and so does not imply RT₂²). This answers a question of Cholak, Jockusch, and Slaman. Our proofs suggest that the essential distinction between ADS and CAC on the one hand and RT₂² on the other is that the colorings needed for our analysis are in some way transitive. We formalize this intuition as the notions of transitive and semitransitive colorings and show that the existence of homogeneous sets for such colorings is equivalent to ADS and CAC, respectively. We finish with several open questions. (shrink)

After briefly sketching common-morality principlism, as presented in Principles of Biomedical Ethics, this paper responds to two recent sets of challenges to this framework. The first challenge claims that medical ethics is autonomous and unique and thus not a form of, or justified or guided by, a common morality or by any external morality or moral theory. The second challenge denies that there is a common morality and insists that futile efforts to develop common-morality approaches to bioethics limit diversity (...) and prevent needed moral change. This paper argues that these two critiques fundamentally fail because they significantly misunderstand their target and because their proposed alternatives have major deficiencies and encounter insurmountable problems. (shrink)

I consider the question of how literally one can construe the “gauge argument,” which is the canonical means of understanding the putatively central import of local gauge symmetry principles for fundamental physics. As I argue, the gauge argument must be afforded a heuristic reading. Claims to the effect that the argument reflects a deep “logic of nature” must, for numerous reasons I discuss, be taken with a grain of salt.

This paper compares and contrasts three different substantive principles of justice for making health care priority-setting or “rationing” decisions: need principles, maximising principles and egalitarian principles. The principles are compared by tracing out their implications for a hypothetical rationing decision involving four identified patients. This decision has been the subject of an empirical study of public opinion based on small-group discussions, which found that the public seem to support a pluralistic combination of all three kinds (...) of rationing principle. In conclusion, it is suggested that there is room for further work by philosophers and others on the development of a coherent and pluralistic theory of health care rationing which accords with public opinions. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold: First, to present an examination of the principles underlying gauge field theories. I shall argue that there are two principles directly connected to the two well-known theorems of Emmy Noether concerning global and local symmetries of the free matter-field Lagrangian, in the following referred to as "conservation principle" and "gauge principle". Since both these express nothing but certain symmetry features of the free field theory, they are not sufficient to derive a (...) true interaction coupling to a new gauge field. For this purpose it is necessary to advocate a third, truly empirical principle which may be understood as a generalization of the equivalence principle. The second task of the paper is to deal with the ontological question concerning the reality status of gauge potentials in the light of the proposed logical structure of gauge theories. A nonlocal interpretation of topological effects in gauge theories and, thus, the non-reality of gauge potentials in accordance with the generalized equivalence principle will be favoured. (shrink)

A survey of democratic institutions and republics reveals the aristocratic origins of democracy.

Henry Sidgwick,, philosopher, classicist, lecturer and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and supporter of women's university education, is well known for his Method of Ethics, a significant and influential book on moral theory. First published in 1883, this work considers the role the state plays in economic life, and whether economics should be considered an Art or a Science. Sidgwick applies his utilitarian views to economics, defending John Stuart Mill's 1848 treatise of the same name. The book calls for a (...) return to traditional political economy by eliminating 'needless polemics'. Sidgwick also outlines the need to bridge the gap between his analytical or deductive method and the inductive method employed by Mill's critics, the new generation of economic philosophers including John Elliot Cairnes and William Stanley Jevons. The second edition, reissued here, was published in 1887. (shrink)

This unique text focuses on ethical puzzles and hypothetical problems to help students at all levels understand and refine their moral principles and see how they apply to various situations. An extensive, thoughtfully written introduction provides the theoretical background and lays out numerous moral puzzle cases that are analyzed and discussed throughout the text. Challenging follow-up articles argue a variety of stances on the ethical puzzles set forth in the introduction.

A remarkable surge in efforts to assess the quality of life of patients has occurred in recent years in medical research. Philosophical discussions of these developments have focused, on the one hand, on epistemological reservations about the plausibility of measuring quality of life and, on the other hand, on moral and ethical qualms about the meaning of life conveyed in such assessments. Whilst providing an important note of caution, such critiques fail to recognise two basic principles of quality of (...) life in medical research. Firstly it is intended to provide understanding about groups and categories of patients rather than individuals. Secondly the purpose of such research is to produce generalisations about the relative costs and benefits of specific health care interventions rather than absolute judgements regarding the quality of life of patients per se. Selecting a good quality of life measure for a clinical trial requires balancing criteria such as validity with practical feasibility. Such measures will play an increasingly central role in providing research evidence to improve health care. (shrink)