Patients who are subject to compulsory care constitute a substantial proportion of the work-load of mental health professionals, particularly psychiatric nurses. This article examines the traditional ‘beneficence-autonomy’ approach to ethics in compulsory psychiatric care and evaluates it against the reality of daily practice. Risk to the public has always been an important but often unacknowledged consideration. Inequalities exist among ethnic and socio-economic groups and there is a lack of agreement on what constitutes mental disorder. Two major changes in compulsory psychiatric (...) care - community orders and care for patients with untreatable severe personality disorders - further challenge the traditional ethical approach. There are also important human rights implications. The simple patient-health professional relationship no longer provides an adequate framework for mental health professionals on which to base their ethical decisions. The public and organizations may have different perspectives and their interests are becoming increasingly important. Mental health professionals, particularly psychiatric nurses, may face ethical dilemmas because of these different perspectives. (shrink)

Policies on whether student and qualified nurses should be screened for bloodborne infections and whether infected individuals should be excluded from work must be based on sound ethical principles. Patients have rights, and nurses and employers have duties to respect these rights. However, nurses also have rights that must be respected by their employers and the State. Balancing these competing rights and duties is a complex procedure. In this article, these rights and duties are discussed and applied to a selection (...) of issues. (shrink)

Medication error is the most common and consistent type of error occurring in hospitals. This article attempts to explore the ethical issues relating to the nursing management of medication errors in clinical areas in Macau, China. A qualitative approach was adopted. Seven registered nurses who were involved in medication errors were recruited for in-depth interviews. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using content analysis. Regarding the management of patients, the nurses acknowledged the mistakes but did not disclose the incidents to (...) patients and relatives. Concerning management of the nurses involved by senior staff, most participants experienced fairness, comfort and understanding during the process of reporting and investigation. The ethical issues relating to the incidents were discussed, particularly in the Chinese context. There is a need for further study relating to the disclosure of medication incidents to patients and some suggestions were made. (shrink)

The "I Ching" had an important influence on Tokugawa Shinto. First, it played a crucial role in the discussion of Confucian-Shinto relations; many Tokugawa Confucians and Shintoists used it to uphold the doctrine of the unity of Confucianism and Shinto, and Shintoists and scholars of National Learning (kokugaku) used it for its metaphysical and divinational value. Second, scholars of National Learning transformed it from a Confucian classic into a Shinto text, claiming that it was the handiwork of a Japanese (...) deity. (shrink)

In the past decades, researchers of Cantonese treated the frequently used sentence-final particles (hereafter SFPs) wo3 (?, mid level tone) and bo3 (?, mid level tone) as variant forms, the former being the result of sound change from the latter (Kwok 1984, Luke 1990, Li 1995, Fang 2003). However, Leung (2010) argues that wo3 in the late 20th century performs the functions of realization, reminder, hearsay and contrast while the main function of bo3 is only to show contrast, thus (...) they are not entirely interchangeable. To explore the development of the two particles from the historical prospective, this paper attempts to examine them in Hong Kong Cantonese diachronically based on the spoken data of old Cantonese movies of 1940s and 1970s. (shrink)

In the past decades, researchers of Cantonese treated the frequently used sentence-final particles wo3 and bo3 as variant forms, the former being the result of sound change from the latter. However, Leung argues that wo3 in the late 20th century performs the functions of realization, reminder, hearsay and contrast while the main function of bo3 is only to show contrast, thus they are not entirely interchangeable. To explore the development of the two particles from the historical prospective, this paper (...) attempts to examine them in Hong Kong Cantonese diachronically based on the spoken data of old Cantonese movies of 1940s and 1970s. (shrink)

A review of Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu,_ Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema _.

The subject of normalization and its relationship to sex/gender is a major one in feminist theory; Heyes' book is unique in her masterful use of Foucault; its clarity, and its sophisticated mix of the theoretical and the anecdotal. It will appeal to feminist philosophers and theorists.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's work has been widely interpreted and appropriated by subsequent philosophers, as well as by scholars from areas as diverse as anthropology, cultural studies, literary theory, sociology, law, and medicine. The Grammar of Politics demonstrates the variety of ways political philosophers understand Wittgenstein's importance to their discipline and apply Wittgensteinian methods to their own projects. In her introduction, Cressida J. Heyes notes that Wittgenstein himself was skeptical of political theory, and that his philosophy does not lead naturally or (...) inexorably toward any particular political position. Instead, she says, his ideas motivate certain attitudes toward the "game of politics" that the essays in this volume share: some contributors argue that political theory should use Wittgensteinian methods, others apply Wittgenstein's philosophy of language to figures and debates in areas of political theory (such as post-Kantian genealogy or Habermas's foundationalism), and still others reveal the ways Wittgenstein's concepts inform political foci as diverse as anthropomorphism, defining social group membership, and the nature of liberty. (shrink)

This is a fresh and vitally important step past stymied debate on what is arguably the most pressing issue in cross-disciplinary feminist theory.

This article examines one argument in favour of the position that the relational properties of mental states do not have causal powers over behaviour. This argument states that we establish that the relational properties of mental states do not have causal powers by considering cases where intrinsic properties remain the same but relational properties vary to see whether, under such circumstances, behaviour would ever vary. The individualist argues that behaviour will not vary with relational properties alone, which means that they (...) don’t have causal powers. Four replies are presented which all reject the premise that under such conditions behaviour can never be different, and each of these are refuted. The article concludes by arguing that knowing about the relational properties of mental states gives no predictive advantage over (and, in fact, is predictively worse than) knowing about the intrinsic properties of mental states plus context. (shrink)

This paper studies the relationship between organizational ethical climate and the forms of organizational citizenship behavior , including in-role and extra-role behaviors, and examines the mediating effect of employee loyalty. A sample of employees from a traditional Hong Kong-based company was used as a study group. The purpose of this study was to examine the causes and implications of how various ethical work climates affect employee performance. Based on a model proposed by Victor and Cullen, ethical climate is arranged from (...) lower levels to higher levels. The results suggest that lower levels of ethical climate , characterizing a weak relational contract between employee and employer, are associated with negative extra-role behavior. In contrast, higher levels of ethical climate , symbolic of a strong relational contract at work, are associated with positive extra-role behavior. Moreover, normative commitment mediated a positive relationship between caring and identification with the company, whereas attitudinal loyalty mediated the negative relationship between independence and altruism. Implications for future research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

: This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses—practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members' capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom and flexibility. The hupomnemata of these organizations thus use asketic language to conceal their implication in normalization.

This article argues that commercial weight-loss organizations appropriate and debase the askeses—practices of care of the self—that Michel Foucault theorized, increasing members’ capacities at the same time as they encourage participation in ever-tightening webs of power. Weight Watchers, for example, claims to promote self-knowledge, cultivate new capacities and pleasures, foster self-care in face of gendered exploitation, and encourage wisdom and flexibility. The hupomnemata of these organizations thus use asketic language to conceal their implication in normalization.

This essay identifies two kinds of awareness of one’s body that occur in a variety of literatures: awareness as psychologically or spiritually enabling or therapeutic, and awareness as undesirable self-consciousness of the body. Drawing on Foucault’s account of normalizing judgment, it argues that these two forms of awareness are impossible to separate, if that separation is into authentic versus extrinsic somatic experience. Nonetheless, awareness is an important component of embodied freedom, but a freedom understood with Spinoza and Nietzsche as grounded (...) in necessity rather than only in the will, and with Arendt and Foucault as a practice rather than an achievement of a sovereign subject. Somatic practices grounded in awareness and acceptance of the body’s necessities, along with attention to the I-can cultivate a form of embodied freedom that bridges care of the self and the political. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of Sartre's phenomenological ontology in light of the pre-modern understanding of ‘transcendentals’ as universal properties and predicates of all determinate beings. Drawing on Sartre's transcendental account of nothingness in his early critique of Husserl as well as his discussion of ‘determination as negation’ in Being and Nothingness, this article argues that Sartre's universal predicate of ‘the not’ (le non) could be understood in a similar light to the medieval scholastic conception of transcendentals. But whereas the (...) scholastics saw the transcendental properties of oneness, truth, and goodness as reflections of God's divine perfections, Sartre's predicate of the ‘not’ operates as an atheistic transcendental which signifies the non-being of God – that God is not. By comparing Sartre's phenomenological ontology to medieval theological metaphysics, this article not only highlights the atheist underpinnings of Sartre's entire ontological schema in Being and Nothingness but also offers a new way of interpreting Sartre as a systematic transcendental metaphysician. (shrink)

How are ‘philosophy’ and ‘gender’ implicated? Throughout history, philosophers—mostly men, though with more women among their number than is sometimes supposed—have often sought to specify and justify the proper roles of women and men, and to explore the political consequences of sexual difference. The last forty years, however, have seen a dramatic explosion of critical thinking about how philosophy is a gendered discipline; there has also been an abundance of philosophical work that uses gender as a central analytic category. In (...) particular, feminist philosophy has become established as a major field of inquiry, and it is now complemented by related emerging areas, including the philosophy of race and the philosophy of sex and love. For those working in Philosophy and Gender dizzying questions such as the following arise: What justifications were used historically for the exclusion or inclusion of women in political life, and what is their contemporary resonance? How is what counts as knowledge shaped by gender norms? What metaphysical questions about identity are raised by sex change? How might some feminist philosophies risk reproducing racist assumptions about what it means to be a woman, while some critical philosophies of race assume a masculine subject? What does it mean to say that moral theories are gendered? Addressing the need for an authoritative and comprehensive reference work to enable users to answer these and other questions, and to make sense of—and to navigate around—an ever more complex corpus of scholarly literature, Philosophy and Gender is a new title in Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Philosophy series. Edited by Cressida J. Heyes, it is a four-volume collection of foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship. It features critical analysis of gender as it relates to philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, social and political thought, aesthetics, and philosophy of science; it is also distinctive in showing how feminist thought has been intertwined in both analytic and continental traditions. The collection reconfigures ‘gender and philosophy’ into an integrated field of inquiry while providing an invaluable resource for scholars in all disciplines who need to know how to think critically about gender. In so doing it responds to recent curriculum developments, while providing a crucial reference guide for theoretically minded scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Supplemented with a full index, and including an introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the assembled materials in their historical and intellectual context, Philosophy and Gender is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital research resource. (shrink)

Third wave anti-essentialist critique has too often been used to dismiss second wave feminist projects. I examine claims that Carol Gilligan's work is "essentialist," and argue that her recent research requires this criticism be rethought. Anti-essentialist feminist method should consist in attention to the relations of power that construct accounts of gendered identity in the course of different forms of empirical enquiry, not in rejecting any general claim about women or girls.

A short critical engagement as part of a symposium on Ami Harbin's book Disorientation and Moral Life.

Philosophers sometimes hope that our discipline will be transformative for students, perhaps especially when we teach so-called philosophy of the body. To that end, this article describes an experimental upper-level undergraduate course cross-listed between Philosophy and Physical Education, entitled “Thinking Through the Body: Philosophy and Yoga.” Drawing on the perspectives of professor and students, we show how a somatic practice (here, hatha yoga) and reading texts (here, primarily contemporary phenomenology) can be integrated in teaching and learning. We suggest that the (...) course raised questions about the ethics of evaluation as well as about the split between theory and practice, which have larger pedagogical implications. (shrink)

Legal interpreting and translation are some of the oldest and most frequently practised bilingual activities in Hong Kong. The principles and operation of the bilingual legal system actually impinge on the legal interpreting services and the practices of legal interpreting services also in ways impact on the system itself. This study adopts a historical approach to analyse the jurisprudence and administration of legal interpreting in Hong Kong courts from 1966 to 2016, across the 1997 dividing line between British colonial rule (...) and the return of Hong Kong to the government of mainland China. It focuses on the opinions of judges and other participants in courtroom proceedings as recorded in Hong Kong case reports. It is discovered that the jurisprudence of having an interpreter to interpret for participants who do not speak the language of the court is clearly indicated and well versed in the precedents. However, there is a gap between the jurisprudence and the actual interpreting services, mainly caused by the malpractices of the concerned administration department and some of the law enforcement agents working in the frontline. (shrink)

This study investigates how firms in the gambling industry manage their corporate social disclosures about controversial issues. We performed thematic content analysis of CSDs about responsible gambling, money laundering prevention and environmental protection in the annual reports and stand-alone CSR reports of four USA-based multinational gambling firms and their four Macao counterparts. This study draws on impression management theory, camouflage theory and corporate integrity theory to examine the gambling firms’ CSDs. We infer that the CSD strategies of gambling firms in (...) Macao and the USA did not serve as vehicles for reflexivity about social responsibility or social responsiveness. Instead, the firms camouflaged legitimacy gaps about sensitive topics by adopting assertive or defensive façades, disclaiming ethical responsibility, curtailing disclosure, or offering zero disclosure. Differences between CSD strategies according to topic, location, time, and reporting channel appear to reflect four factors: pressure to report, availability of good news, whether a firm was assuming ethical responsibility for addressing the topic, and the prospective readership. This study extends our understanding of the contextual and topic-specific factors affecting the quantity and character of CSDs by firms in a contested industry. (shrink)

Our study of queer women patients and their primary health care providers in Halifax, Nova Scotia, reveals a gap between providers’ theoretical knowledge of “cultural competency” and patients’ experience. Drawing on Patricia Benner’s Dreyfusian model of skill acquisition in nursing, we suggest that the dissonance between the anti-heteronormative principles expressed in interviews and the relative absence of skilled anti-heteronormative clinical practice can be understood as a failure to grasp the field of practice as a whole. Moving from “knowing-that” to “knowing-how” (...) in terms of anti-heteronormative clinical skills is not only a desirable epistemological trajectory, we argue, but also a way of understanding better and worse ethical practice. (shrink)

A recent clinical literature on the psychology of cosmetic surgery patients is concerned with distinguishing good from bad candidates. Body Dysmorphic Disorder — a mental disorder marked by a pathological aversion to some aspect of one’s appearance — is typically understood in this context as a contra-indication for cosmetic surgery, as it marks those with inappropriate motivation who are unlikely to be satisfied by the surgery’s outcomes. This article uses Foucault’s genealogical work to argue that both the attempt to provide (...) diagnostic conditions for BDD itself, and the broader attempt to demarcate normal and psychopathological concern with appearance are, in part, effects of disciplinary power. Although often presented as a way of making cosmetic surgery more ethical and restrained, this epistemic project inadvertently defends cosmetic surgical interests. Specifically, it contributes to legitimizing the image of an ethically suspect sub-specialty of medicine, and supports its commercial expansion and effective profit-making by displacing its negative sequelae onto patient psyches. (shrink)

This paper attempts to investigate how and why organisations in Macao’s gambling industry engage in corporate social responsibility. It is based on an in-depth investigation of Macao’s gambling industry with 49 semi-structured interviews, conducted in 2011. We found that firms within the industry were emphasising pragmatic legitimacy based on both economic and non-economic contributions, in order to project positive images of the industry, while glossing over two domains of adverse externalities: problem gambling among visitors, and the pollution and despoliation of (...) the environment. By engaging symbolically rather than substantively in CSR, the gambling firms were diverting attention away from issues of moral legitimacy, in order to be allowed to continue to pursue “business as usual” as a means of obtaining substantial financial returns in a social, cultural and socio-political context that was exerting relatively little public pressure to improve corporate social and environmental performance. We conjecture that the gambling firms were feeding on borrowed time. (shrink)

One area of focus in contemporary debates on the Zhuangzi is whether the text endorses some kind of skepticism. For example, in chapter 2, Wang Ni expresses doubt toward "benevolence and rightness" and "the paths of right and wrong." He refuses to claim that there is something of which all things will agree to be right. However, the text repeatedly employs terms like "great knowledge" or "authentic knowledge", which hint at something endorsed or exalted by the text, if not right (...) in itself. Therefore, scholars have been trying to reconcile two sides of the Zhuangzi: the "guru" and the "skeptic."1 In the literature, scholars have refined their interpretation by differentiating skepticism into... (shrink)

In both the literal and metaphorical senses, it seemed as if 1970s America was running out of gas.

Exploratory studies employing volunteer subjects are especially vulnerable to race and class bias. This article illustrates how inattention to race and class as critical dimensions in women's lives can produce biased research samples and lead to false conclusions. It analyzes the race and class background of 200 women who volunteered to participate in an in-depth study of Black and White professional, managerial, and administrative women. Despite a multiplicity of methods used to solicit subjects, White women raised in middle-class families who (...) worked in male-dominated occupations were the most likely to volunteer, and White women were more than twice as likely to respond to media solicitations or letters. To recruit most Black subjects and address their concerns about participation required more labor-intensive strategies involving personal contact. The article discusses reasons for differential volunteering and ways to integrate race and class into qualitative research on women. (shrink)

Since the enactment of the first Hong Kong bilingual ordinance in 1989, tremendous effort and resources have been put to translating English legal documents into Chinese. Long before the implementation of bilingual legislation, the provision of interpreting services has remained an entrenched practice in the courtrooms of Hong Kong. This study has adopted a corpora approach to re-examine what seems to be reasonable and routine practices of the bilingual, legal system, the impacts of bilingual legislation, translation, and interpretation on trial (...) proceedings. Results generated from the corpus show the problems of anglicized Chinese translation of the Sexual Offences Ordinance under the British Common Law system; and interpreters’ performance which is intricately bound by the discourse practices of the legal professionals as well as the ideology of the bilingual legal system in Hong Kong. (shrink)

Recognized as one of the greatest philosophers in classical China, Chu Hsi is especially known in the West through translations of one of his many works, theChin-su Lu. Julia Ching, a noted scholar of Neo-Confucian thought, provides the first book-length examination of Chu-Hsi's religious thought, based on extensive reading in both primary and secondary sources.

I argue that the televisual cosmetic surgical makeover is usefully understood as a contemporary manifestation of normalization, in Foucault’s sense—a process of defining a population in relation to its conformity or deviance from a norm, while simultaneously generating narratives of individual authenticity. Drawing on detailed analysis of “Extreme Makeover,” I suggest that the show erases its complicity with creating homogeneous bodies by representing cosmetic surgery as enabling of personal transformation through its narratives of intrinsic motivation and authentic becoming, and its (...) deployment of fairy tale tropes. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn contrast to his contemporaries who take the heart–mind as the ruler of a person, Zhuangzi suggests that one’s action is guided by the spirit. Questions arise as one articulates the function of spirit and its relationship with the heart–mind. In this article, I articulate the relationship between heart–mind and spirit to show three points: first, spirit is a kind of qi 氣 that can be tied or run smoothly, or rather the mechanism triggered by the functioning of smooth qi. (...) This reading brings the skill passages together with the fasting of heart–mind passage. Second, the proceeding of spirit admits no fixed ways and is not confined to any particular organ or faculty, so it avoids the problem of self-assertion mentioned in Qiwulun. Third, the proceeding of spirit implies that one’s practice takes as many particularities of the context as possible into account, so the person has a higher chance to reduce conflict in interacting with things and other people and bring out their p.. (shrink)

A Dialogue on Foucault and the Psychological Sciences.