The Health Protection Agency has recently attempted to create a postmortem tissue archive to determine the prevalence of abnormal prion protein. The success of this archive was prevented because the Health Protection Agency could not convince coroners to support the study’s methodology and participate on that basis. The findings of this paper detail and support the view that the Coroners’ Society of England and Wales’s refusal to participate was misguided and failed to appreciate that coroners have a moral obligation to (...) protect public health. Measures to assist coroners in fulfilling this role are proposed. (shrink)

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

Environmental ethicists have frequently criticized ancient Greek philosophy as anti-environmental for a view of philosophy that is counterproductive to environmental ethics and a view of the world that puts nature at the disposal of people. This provocative collection of original essays reexamines the views of nature and ecology found in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus. Recognizing that these thinkers were not confronted with the environmental degradation that threatens contemporary philosophers, the contributors to this book find that (...) the Greeks nevertheless provide an excellent foundation for a sound theory of environmentalism. (shrink)

Bioethics and feminist scholarship has explored various justice implications of nonmedical sex selection and family balancing. However, prospective users’ viewpoints have been absent from the debate over the socially acceptable bounds of nonmedical sex selection. This qualitative study provides a set of empirically grounded perspectives on the moral values that underpin prospective users’ conceptualizations of justice in the context of a family balancing program in the United States. The results indicate that couples pursuing family balancing understand justice primarily in individualist (...) and familial terms rather than in terms of social justice for women and girls or for children resulting from sex selection. Study participants indicated that an individual’s desire for gender balance in their family is ethically complex and may not be inherently sexist, immoral, or socially consequential, particularly given the social context in which they live. Our findings suggest that the social conditions that contribute to prospective users’ desires for gender balance in their families may direct them away from recognizing or engaging broader social justice concerns relating to sexism and stratified reproduction. (shrink)

Neuroscientists are searching for the engram within the conceptual framework established by John Locke's theory of mind. This framework was elaborated before the development of information theory, before the development of information processing machines and the science of computation, before the discovery that molecules carry hereditary information, before the discovery of the codon code and the molecular machinery for editing the messages written in this code and translating it into transcription factors that mark abstract features of organic structure such as (...) anterior and distal. The search for the engram needs to abandon Locke's conceptual framework and work within a framework informed by these developments. The engram is the medium by which information extracted from past experience is transmitted to the computations that inform future behavior. The information-conveying symbols in the engram are rapidly generated in the course of computations, which implies that they are molecules. (shrink)

Recent reports published by the United Nations and the World Health Organization suggest that the brain drain of healthcare professionals from the developing to the developed world is decimating the provision of healthcare in poor countries. The migration of these key workers is driven by a combination of economic inequalities and the recruitment policies of governments in the rich world. This article assesses the impact of the healthcare brain drain and argues that wealthy countries have a moral obligation to reduce (...) the flow of healthcare workers from the developing to the developed world. (shrink)

We are grateful to Friesen and colleagues for drawing attention to the tension between the protection of populations that may experience vulnerability with their inclusion in research (Friesen et a...

Pain is an important focus for consciousness research because it is an avenue for exploring somatic awareness, emotion, and the genesis of subjectivity. In principle, pain is awareness of tissue trauma, but pain can occur in the absence of identifiable injury, and sometimes substantive tissue injury produces no pain. The purpose of this paper is to help bridge pain research and consciousness studies. It reviews the basic sensory neurophysiology associated with tissue injury, including transduction, transmission, modulation, and central representation. In (...) addition, it highlights the central mechanisms for the emotional aspects of pain, demonstrating the physiological link between tissue trauma and mechanisms of emotional arousal. Finally, we discuss several current issues in the field of pain research that bear on central issues in consciousness studies, such as sickness and sense of self. (shrink)

A comparison is made between the Bohm trajectory and Feynman path approaches to the long-standing problem of determining the average lime taken for a particle described by the Schrödinger wave function ψ to tunnel through a potential barrier. The former approach follows simply and uniquely from the basic postulates of Bohm's causal interpretation of quantum mechanics; the latter is intimately related to the most frequently cited approaches based on conventional interpretations. Emphasis is given to the fact that fundamentally different transmission (...) (T)-reflection (R) decompositions, particlelike and wavelike respectively, are central to the two methods: ¦ψ¦2=[¦ψ¦2]T+[¦ψ¦2]R (Bohm trajectory approach); ψ=ψT+ψR (Feynman path approach). (shrink)

Statisticians in medicine can disagree on appropriate methodology applicable to the design and analysis of clinical trials. So called Bayesians and frequentists both claim ethical superiority. This paper, by defining and then linking together various dichotomies, argues there is a place for both statistical camps. The choice between them depends on the phase of clinical trial, disease prevalence and severity, but supremely on the ethics underlying the particular trial. There is always a tension present between physicians primarily obligated to their (...) own patients (the weight of 'individual ethics') and ethical committees responsible for the scientific merit of the trial and its long-term implications ('collective ethics'). Individual ethics, it is proposed, favour the Bayesian approach; collective ethics, the frequentist. Though in some situations the choice appears clear-cut, there remain other where both methodologies can be appropriate. (shrink)

Ancillary care is care that research participants need that is not essential to make the research safe or scientifically valid and is not needed to remedy injuries that eventuate as a result of the research project itself. Ancillary care duties have recently been defended on the grounds of beneficence, entrustment, utility and consent. Justice has also been mentioned as a possible basis of ancillary care duties, but little attention has been paid to this approach. In this paper, the author seeks (...) to rectify this omission by arguing that ancillary care duties can be based on a principle of justice as rectification. (shrink)

Recent research on the relations of personality to well-being shows that the people who are most healthy, happy and fulfilled are those who are high in all three of the character traits of self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence as measured by the Temperament and Character Inventory. In the past, the healthy personality has often been considered to require only high self-directedness and high cooperativeness. However, now the self-centred behaviour of people who are low in self-transcendence is degrading the conditions needed for (...) sustainable life by all human beings. Consequently, human beings need to and can develop their capacity for self-transcendence in order to maintain their individual and collective well-being. (shrink)

This book charts new ground, specifically, in its negotiation of a definition of animal welfare, in its systematic discussion of the organizations actually ...

The theory of weak measurements developed by Aharonov and coworkers has been applied by them and others to several interesting problems in which the system of interest is both pre- and post-selected. When the probability of successful post-selection is very small the prediction for the weak value of the measured quantity is often “bizarre” and sometimes controversial, lying outside the range of possibility for a classical system or for a quantum system in the absence of post-selection (e.g. negative kinetic energies (...) associated with particles found immediately after the weak measurement deep inside a classically forbidden region). In Bohmian mechanics a quantum particle is postulated to be a point-like particle which is always accompanied by a wave which probes its environment and guides its motion accordingly. Hence, from the point of view of this theory, it is natural to ask whether the measured weak value under consideration is a property of the point-like particle or of the wave (or of both) and what, if anything, it is that is actually being measured. In this paper, weak measurements of position, momentum and kinetic energy are considered for very simple case studies with these questions in mind. (shrink)

Professor Austin explores four main areas in this paper. First of all he outlines the physical development of sex differentiation in the embryo. He develops this by describing the clinical manifestations of abnormality which can appear at that stage. Professor Austin points out that there are relatively few people with abnormalities and that those who do show homosexual tendencies are not noticeably different from the norm in terms of their sexual equipment and hormone levels. It is much more likely that (...) their psychological and social development has a greater influence in differentiating them sexually. The last section of the paper is a synopsis of society's reactions to homosexuality or bisexuality which term in Professor Austin's opinion is more accurate and descriptive of the condition. (shrink)

The title may be understood in three ways. Firstly, the truth under study is the truth about freedom. We speak of the truth of something, in as much as we presume that there are many misconceptions about that something, and it stands in need of clarification. Thus, the many misconceptions about freedom will have to be divested, if freedom is to be rightly grasped. Secondly, in the sense that there is a truth in the core of freedom, indeed, truth is (...) the essence of freedom. If truth is to be rightly grasped, its core has to be penetrated. Thirdly, there is a deeper relation between truth and freedom. Freedom cannot be understood, much less rightly practised, if we do not comprehend the necessary relation that freedom bears to truth. This essay purports to study all three senses, not quite generally, but with special reference to Ratzinger, the German theologian-cum-phenomenologist of religion, who also happens to be the current pope Benedict XVI of the Catholic Christianity. The study proceeds in three stages. First of all, I will give the statement of the problem. Secondly, I will briefly dwell on the modern Western history of freedom. Thirdly, I will study the interface between freedom and truth, highlighting the nature of human freedom, the relation between freedom and responsibility, and the relation between freedom and the truth of human existence itself. The essay is more interpretive than evaluative, with an eye to be as close to the insightful thoughts of Ratzinger as possible. (shrink)