Volume 20, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 51-53.

John A Barrie; G. H. Bantock as Educational Philosopher, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 24, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 93–106, https://doi.org/10.1.

This paper considers the problems that arise when death, which is a philosophically difficult concept, is incorporated into healthcare metrics, such as the quality-adjusted life year (QALY). These problems relate closely to the debate over euthanasia and assisted suicide because negative QALY scores can be taken to mean that patients would be ‘better off dead’. There is confusion in the literature about the meaning of 0 QALY, which is supposed to act as an ‘anchor’ for the surveyed preferences on which (...) QALYs are based. In the context of the debate over euthanasia, the QALY assumes an ability to make meaningful comparisons between life-states and death. Not only is this assumption questionable, but the ethical debate is much more broad than the question of whether death is preferable to a state of living. QALYs are derived from preferences about health states, so do not necessarily reflect preferences about events (eg, dying) or actions (eg, killing). This paper presents a new kind of problem for the QALY. As it stands, the QALY provides confused and unreliable information when it reports zero or negative values, and faces further problems when it appears to recommend death. This should preclude its use in the debate over euthanasia and assisted suicide. These problems only apply where the QALY involves or seems to involve a comparison between life-states and death, and are not relevant to the more general discussion of the use of QALYs as a tool for comparing the benefits derived from treatment options. (shrink)

There is a common view that as well as being conscious of the world in virtue of having thoughts about it, forming representations of its various states and processes, we are also conscious of it in virtue of feeling it. What I have in mind is not the fact that we have feelings about the world—indignation at this, pleasure at that—but that we sensorily feel its colours, sounds, textures and so on. And this feeling form of consciousness, it's often thought, (...) constitutes a peculiarly intimate and intense focus upon things. The feel of the first drops of rain on one's face and the sounds of the gull's cry will quickly be recognized for what they are; and the fact that events of this sort are occurring will thereafter hold one's attention just insofar as they are relevant to some current business. But what can also happen is that such experiences cut through any current concerns and cause a state in which, for a time, one does nothing except feel the soft coolness of the rain and the particular quality of the bird's cry. We can become absorbed, it seems, in the mere presence of these phenomena and this is an experience to which we attach great value. (shrink)

In a well?known passage, Wittgenstein suggests that claims about what I would have said if asked, offered as an elucidation of what I meant, are hypotheses. Some have argued that Wittgenstein commits himself here to the view that claims about what I meant are hypotheses. I argue that this is to misinterpret the relevant passages and is at odds with central themes in Wittgenstein's philosophy, particularly what he has to say about the first?person relation to meaning. This is not of (...) the external kind that the hypothesis model would suggest. Claims about what I would in fact have said are indeed hypotheses; but claims about what I would have said that are used to explicate what I meant have a quite different status. In a final section, I consider Wittgenstein's belief that the regularity of our meaning?governed behaviour need continue ?no further in the direction of the centre? and may emerge out of ?chaos?. I offer an account of these claims which gives no support to the hypothesis theory. (shrink)

Plotinus was much exercised by Plato's doctrines of the soul. In this treatise, at chapter 1 line 27, he talks of "the divine Plato, who has said in many places in his works many noble things about the soul and its arrival here, so that we can hope for some clarity from him. So what does the philosopher say? It is clear that he does not always speak with sufficient consistency for us to make out his intentions with any ease." (...) The issue in this treatise is one that has puzzled students of Plato from ancient to modern times—and is indeed a popular topic for undergraduate essays even today: Why should the philosopher, who has ascended through a long and painful process of dialectic to "assimilation to the divine," ever descend back into the body? Plotinus himself is said by Porphyry to have attained such a state of other-worldly transcendence on at least four occasions during his lifetime, so this was a very real and personal issue for him. In this treatise we see him grappling with it. (shrink)

In this essay I preface a discussion of “indifferent” globality, as seen in the agency of microbes and smart machines, and populism as an exemplar of tensions in local-global entanglements, with a brief excursus on the what exercises current scholarship on the global. The whole is written with Protosociology’s 30 year engagement with hard questions in social theory in mind.

This research illustrates dangers inherent in the gap created when organizations decouple ethics program adoption from implementation. Using a sample of 182 professionals in the pharmaceutical and financial services industries, we examine the relationship between structural decoupling of formal ethics programs and individual-level perceptions and behavior. Findings strongly support the hypothesized relationships between decoupling and organizational members’ legitimacy perceptions of the ethics program, psychological contract breach, organizational cynicism, and unethical behavior.

This article begins by wondering how the writer’s transformation into motherhood affects her practice of reading, writing and research: how maternities are made academic. Specifically, this article is interested in thinking through lactating breasts, as a particularly complex and potentially subversive ‘performance’ of maternity. In addition, this article reframes ‘maternal thinking’ through 1990s theories of embodiment and corporeality, and asks how embodied practices like breastfeeding might be theorized, as well as how ‘embodied theory’ might be practised. In looking at various (...) cultural texts about breasts and breastfeeding, the article is scripted into a series of connective and reflexive scenes around performance, space, language and knowledge, coming to rest in the imaginative project of an epistemology of breasts. It sets reflexive accounts of lived experience alongside theoretical reflections to create a dynamic and thoughtful reading of breasts, entwining personal and public discourses, maternal and academic writing, theorizing and cultural practices. (shrink)

It appears that there is a conflict of values running through business ethics between profits accruing to shareholders and the cost of entrepreneurial activities on wider stakeholders. In the ethics research literature, the multiplicity of normative ethical stances has resulted in much debate but little in the way of consistent policy proposals. There is, by comparison, an extensive literature in positive economics that attempts to resolve value conflicts similar to those faced by business ethicists. In this paper the adoption of (...) positive welfare statements are advocated and the value judgements implicit in economics are used as the starting point. It is argued that there is merit in expressly stating a set of value judgements to demonstrate the intractable nature of finding a social consensus without a positive social welfare function that explicitly weights the values. This paper reviews the arguments surrounding corporate objectives, particularly with regard to ethical considerations and the profit maximisation orthodoxy. This is discussed within the stakeholder‐stockholder narrative. A range of ethical positions in the management strategy literature are analysed and discussed. It is argued that the values underpinning business ethics research can be conceived of via a function of social welfare (including an ethical ‘auctioneering’ model). The paper concludes by suggesting that all ethical positions can be captured by a Bergson‐type welfare function. (shrink)

It appears that there is a conflict of values running through business ethics between profits accruing to shareholders and the cost of entrepreneurial activities on wider stakeholders. In the ethics research literature, the multiplicity of normative ethical stances has resulted in much debate but little in the way of consistent policy proposals. There is, by comparison, an extensive literature in positive economics that attempts to resolve value conflicts similar to those faced by business ethicists. In this paper the adoption of (...) positive welfare statements are advocated and the value judgements implicit in economics are used as the starting point. It is argued that there is merit in expressly stating a set of value judgements to demonstrate the intractable nature of finding a social consensus without a positive social welfare function that explicitly weights the values. This paper reviews the arguments surrounding corporate objectives, particularly with regard to ethical considerations and the profit maximisation orthodoxy. This is discussed within the stakeholder‐stockholder narrative. A range of ethical positions in the management strategy literature are analysed and discussed. It is argued that the values underpinning business ethics research can be conceived of via a function of social welfare (including an ethical ‘auctioneering’ model). The paper concludes by suggesting that all ethical positions can be captured by a Bergson‐type welfare function. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Ethics of War. By Barrie Paskins and Michael Dockrill.

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I have chosen this title to set myself the task of commenting on the practice of philosophy in the light of my work as a philosopher in a university postgraduate department of war studies. I shall begin with some general remarks on how we are to understand ‘philosophy’, then discuss a neglected one-sidedness in the commentary which philosophers have attempted on such topics as the problems of the nuclear age.

I have chosen this title to set myself the task of commenting on the practice of philosophy in the light of my work as a philosopher in a university postgraduate department of war studies. I shall begin with some general remarks on how we are to understand ‘philosophy’, then discuss a neglected one-sidedness in the commentary which philosophers have attempted on such topics as the problems of the nuclear age.

The distinction between occurrent and non-occurrent mental states is frequently appealed to by contemporary philosophers, but it has never been explicated in any significant detail. In the literature, two accounts of the distinction are commonly presupposed. One is that occurrent states are conscious states. The other is that non-occurrent states are dispositional states, and thus that occurrent states are manifestations of dispositions. I argue that neither of these accounts is adequate, and therefore that another account is needed. I propose that (...) occurrent states are active states. (shrink)

Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Mental Health is the first book to question the equation of psychological normality and mental health. It is also the first book to take contemporary psychiatry and clinical psychology to task for deeply flawed thinking when they accept the diagnostic system propounded by the DSM, which reifies syndromes into alleged “mental disorders.” Where Thomas Szasz argued that “mental disorders” are myths, Bartlett makes the much (...) more damaging charge that reifying mental disorders involves a provable form of fallacious thinking, producing a variety of epistemological nonsense. /// -/- -/- The author weighs the evidence, and with strict logic, compelling evidence, and careful analysis, challenges the current paradigm of mental health theorists and practitioners. Never has the case against the standard of psychological normality and against the non-scientific creation of “mental disorders” been made with such boldness, multidisciplinary knowledge, solid scholarship, and clarity of language. /// -/- -/- Normality Does Not Equal Mental HealthAlthough the need to question psychological normality as a satisfactory standard of good mental health has been staring us in the face for a long time, no one, clinical professional or scholar, has had the courage or the intellectual willingness to face with unflinching honesty the shortcomings and disappointments of psychological normality and to propose that we should look elsewhere for standards of good psychological health. /// -/- -/- Contemporary psychiatry and clinical psychology, on the contrary, base their conception of mental health on the standard of psychological normality. This supposition has come to be accepted uncritically and without question, and yet it has become fundamental to current clinical theory and practice, and forms the core of the psychiatric classification system of the DSM, which has become today’s diagnostic authority. /// -/- -/- While touting today’s scientific gold standard of “evidence-based” research, DSM’s authoritative classification of “mental disorders” is itself hardly “evidence-based,” for it is recognized, but seldom emphasized, that the majority of DSM’s “mental disorders” have no known empirical, organic basis. /// -/- -/- Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health takes DSM to task not only for its failure to adhere to today’s evidence-based standard, but for its failure to rein in its highly speculative diagnostic labeling, in accordance with the modern paradigm of rigorous science, which repudiates metaphorical reifications whose alleged validity rests only on the voting preferences of a professional membership. /// -/- -/- The book is a carefully argued critique of the dominant assumption in current psychiatry and clinical psychology that psychological normality is fundamental to mental health and therefore good. In place of this unsatisfactory presumption, Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health proposes a positive and constructive revision in our understanding of mental health and of our conception of mental disorders. (shrink)