In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 387 and contributed an important and helpful study. This dissertation is a model of its kind. One hopes the author will continue his scholarly efforts. The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. WILLIAM E. MAY John Henry Newman: A Biography. By IAN KER. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 764. $24.95 (paper). The Achievement of John Henry Newman. By IAN KER. Notre Dame: University (...) of Notre Dame Press, 1990. Pp. x + 209. $24.95 (cloth). Ian Ker has inherited the mantle of the late Charles Stephen Dessain as the finest textual expositor of the Newman corpus, and Ker's biography should become a standard reference tool in the field. Ker ap· prenticed under Dessain in the production of the monumental (31volume ) Letters and Diaries, and his biography shows his command of the materials of that as yet unfinished project. Ker's hook joins the biographies of W. Ward (1912) and M. Trevor (1962) as significant "lives of Newman" to consider, and it addresses their earlier shortcomings : Ward's inadequate appraisal of the Anglican Newman and Trevor's unconcern for Newman's theological writings. Of Newman's intellectual contribution, Ker's treatment is similar to Dessain's John Henry Newman, an exposition of the major themes and intellectual moves, and theologically-minded inquirers need read both. Ker offers the hook as a personal life, a literary appraisal, and an intellectual study. The personal life and literary analysis are ably carried off; Ker's background in English literature and his editorial work on the letters have served him well. The intellectual study takes the form of synopses of Newman's hooks and articles, which are woven into the chronological narrative of the life. This aspect of Ker's hook is by no means "the theological achievement of JHN" (cf. Tracy's work on Lonergan); such a project still awaits Newman studies and someone of the conceptual breadth of the late Jan Walgrave to achieve it. Ker provides accurate and readable summaries of Newman's writings, and if a biography is meant to introduce the sundry aspects of a person, especially a complex thinker like Newman, then Ker's treatment of the intellectual aspect offers a fine introduction. I shall consider these three dimensions of the biography, and first the personal life. Newman considered that a person's life is best told 888 BOOK REVIEWS through that person's correspondence. Ker's biography is approached chronologically, and Newman's published letters guide the tale. Newman 's advice is particularly apropos for his own biographer, since Newman 's hooks and articles often displayed a "reserve" in which his true feelings were couched and nuanced. His letters, especially to confidants, were candid and often hard-hitting, as when he described the Curia in these words: " And who is Propaganda? one sharp man of business, who works day and night, and dispatches his work quick off, to the East and West, a high dignitary, [perhaps an Archbishop], hut after all little more than a clerk... with two or.three clerks under him " (p. 519). (Ker displays some reserve himself, omitting Newman's episcopal aside.) Ker's use of the letters is most revealing during Newman's Roman Catholic period when he encountered opposition from Archbishop Manning and W. G. Ward in England, from Archbishop Cullen in Dublin, and from Cardinal Barnaho in Rome. One senses how the laity rallied round him. Some of Newman's most pungent thoughts on ·theological freedom, on the suspicious nature of the clergy toward educated laity, on the wherewithal to make an institution a genuine university, on the role of patience and.trust in God when authorities are hearing down, are to he found in Ker's choice of letters. With so much material to mine-Newman wrote 20,000 letters-it is understandable that Ker does not include, save rarely, what Newman's opponents were thinking. Ker's account of Newman's Anglican period is equally illuminating, and indeed it is a highlight of the biography. While the Apologia has provided the main lines of the story, Ker puts flesh and hones to Newman 's struggle with his conscience. In coming to Oxford, Newman... (shrink)

This report describes the rationale, approaches, organization, and resource development leading to a large-scale deletion bin map of the hexaploid wheat genome. Accompanying reports in this issue detail results from chromosome bin-mapping of expressed sequence tags representing genes onto the seven homoeologous chromosome groups and a global analysis of the entire mapped wheat EST data set. Among the resources developed were the first extensive public wheat EST collection. Described are protocols for sequencing, sequence processing, EST nomenclature, and the assembly of (...) ESTs into contigs. These contigs plus singletons were used for selection of distinct sequence motif unigenes. Selected ESTs were rearrayed, validated by 5′ and 3′ sequencing, and amplified for probing a series of wheat aneuploid and deletion stocks. Images and data for all Southern hybridizations were deposited in databases and were used by the coordinators for each of the seven homoeologous chromosome groups to validate the mapping results. Results from this project have established the foundation for future developments in wheat genomics. (shrink)

Critics of Robert Nozick's libertarian political theory often allege that the theory in general and its account of property rights in particular lack sufficient foundations. A key difficulty is thought to lie in his account of how portions of the world which no one yet owns can justly come to be initially acquired. But the difficulty is illusory, because the concept of justice does not meaningfully apply to initial acquisition in the first place. Moreover, the principle of self-ownership provides a (...) solid foundation for Nozick's libertarianism, and when seen in the light of that principle and its full implications, the standard purported examples of injustices in acquisition are revealed to be nothing of the kind. Footnotesa The original draft of this paper was written in the summer of 2002 while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University. I thank the directors of the Center, Fred D. Miller, Jr., Ellen Frankel Paul, and Jeffrey Paul, for hosting me. I also thank colloquium audience members at Bowling Green State University for comments on that draft. (shrink)

This is a book grounded in the real ethical challenges of modern business practice, with a world-religious perspective so necessary in an era of globalization.

Dual-track assessment directs research ethics committees to assess the risks of research interventions based on the unclear distinction between therapeutic and non-therapeutic interventions. The net risks test, in contrast, relies on the clinically familiar method of assessing the risks and benefits of interventions in comparison to the available alternatives and also focuses attention of the RECs on the central challenge of protecting research participants.Research guidelines around the world recognise that clinical research is ethical only when the risks to participants are (...) reasonable.1 Appropriate implementation of this requirement is vital to protecting research participants and allowing research to proceed when it poses acceptable risks. Unfortunately, as the US National Bioethics Advisory Commission notes: “current regulations do not further elaborate how risks and potential benefits are to be assessed, and little additional guidance is available to IRBs.”1The NBAC, as well as numerous commentators, recommend that research ethics committees , ethics review committees and institutional review boards should adopt what may be called dual-track risk assessment.2–5 Yet, dual-track assessment unnecessarily divides research interventions into two different categories before assessing their risks and relies on the unclear distinction between therapeutic and non-therapeutic interventions. As a result, dual-track assessment provides RECs with confusing guidance and has the potential to block valuable research that poses acceptable risks. This paper describes one alternative, the net risks test, and argues that this approach offers a better method for assessing research risks, one that puts RECs in a position to protect participants without blocking appropriate research studies.BACKGROUNDClinical research exposes participants to interventions and procedures to gather systematic data that may be used to improve overall health and well-being. To ensure that research is ethical, RECs must ensure that the risks and burdens to participants are not excessive and that …. (shrink)

The disagreement over whether Aristotle recognized rights in some form unavoidably involves disagreement over what rights are, and the theory of rights itself is still highly contested. There is no consensus concerning how " right'? is to be defined, how rights are to be theoretically grounded, or how rights theory is to be applied in particular circumstances. This is not, however, a good reason to dismiss the issue of whether there are rights in Aristotle: for Aristotle, like modern rights theorists, (...) is concerned about the moral and legal status of the individual within the community, and he expresses this in terms of claims of justice. The issue is worthy of study not only because it can lead to a deeper understanding of Aristotle's conceptions of justice and the common good, but also because it may shed valuable light on the theoretical foundations of human rights, since he offers a theory of political justice which is based on a metaphysical theory of human nature. (shrink)

We seek to change the conversation about brain death by highlighting the distinction between brain death as a biological concept versus brain death as a legal status. The fact that brain death does not cohere with any biologically plausible definition of death has been known for decades. Nevertheless, this fact has not threatened the acceptance of brain death as a legal status that permits individuals to be treated as if they are dead. The similarities between “legally dead” and “legally blind” (...) demonstrate how we may legitimately choose bright-line legal definitions that do not cohere with biological reality. Not only does this distinction bring conceptual coherence to the conversation about brain death, but it has practical implications as well. Once brain death is recognized as a social construction not grounded in biological reality, we create the possibility of changing the social construction in ways that may better serve both organ donors and recipients alike. (shrink)

The idea that there could be spatially extended mereological simples has recently been defended by a number of metaphysicians (Markosian 1998, 2004; Simons 2004; Parsons (2000) also takes the idea seriously). Peter Simons (2004) goes further, arguing not only that spatially extended mereological simples (henceforth just extended simples) are possible, but that it is more plausible that our world is composed of such simples, than that it is composed of either point-sized simples, or of atomless gunk. The difficulty for these (...) views lies in explaining why it is that the various sub-volumes of space occupied by such simples, are not occupied by proper parts of those simples. Intuitively at least, many of us find compelling the idea that spatially extended objects have proper parts at every sub-volume of the region they occupy. It seems that the defender of extended simples must reject a seemingly plausible claim, what Simons calls the geometric correspondence principle (GCP): that any (spatially) extended object has parts that correspond to the parts of the region that it occupies (Simons 2004: 371). We disagree. We think that GCP is a plausible principle. We also think it is plausible that our world is composed of extended simples. We reconcile these two notions by two means. On the one hand we pay closer attention to the physics of our world. On the other hand, we consider what happens when our concept of something—in this case space—contains elements not all of which are realized in anything, but instead key components are realized in different features of the world. (shrink)

I defend a naturalist theory of moral justification, "Confirmation Theory", from an objection raised by David Copp and Geoffrey Sayre-McCord. Confirmation Theory holds that some moral theory is justified because it is needed in the best empirical explanation of the world. The objection is that moral explanations are "incidental", that even if a moral theory is indispensable, this doesn't establish that any moral standard is justified. I show that the naturalist can concede that moral explanations are incidental and still maintain (...) the attractive elements of Confirmation Theory. (shrink)

The observation that humans are often irrational has become commonplace. This observation has received empirical support from various experiments performed by cognitive scientists that are supposed to show that humans systematically violate principles of probability, rules of logic, and other norms of reasoning. In response to these experiments, philosophers have made creative and appealing arguments that these experiments must be mistaken or misinterpreted because humans must be rational. I examine these arguments for human rationality and show that they fail; cognitive (...) science does play a role in assessing human rationality. ;In Chapter One, I examine three cognitive science experiments in detail and discuss what is at issue in the debate about human rationality. At issue is whether the mistakes humans make are mere mistakes or indicative of systematic divergences from norms of reasoning. Defenders of human rationality say these mistakes are not characteristic of underlying reasoning abilities but are performance errors. Because humans make performance errors, human reasoning ability cannot be read off of behavior, but rather is to be studied by exploring cognitive competence, the underlying ability to reason. ;In Chapter Two, I develop and discuss the notion of cognitive competence. I then consider and reject two arguments that human cognitive competence must match the norms of reasoning. The first argument appeals to simplicity considerations, the second to the supposed common origin of our cognitive competence and our normative standards. In Chapter Three, I turn to a related argument for a view that humans are rational that says cognitive competence is discovered in the same way norms of reasoning are justified: both projects involve reflective equilibrium using as data people's judgments about what counts as good reasoning. ;In Chapter Four, I consider an argument for human rationality that draws on the principle of charity: when translating utterances of a speaker, one should try to interpret her utterances as rational and true. ;In Chapter Five, I consider an argument for human rationality that appeals to evolution. This argument claims that natural selection will select for cognitive mechanisms that produce true beliefs, and that such "truth-tropic" mechanisms are sufficient for being rational. ;My overall conclusion is that while cognitive science does not determine what the normative principles of reasoning are, it is relevant to whether or not human cognitive competence matches these principles; whether or not humans are irrational is, thus, an empirical question. (shrink)

Moral distress is a well-documented phenomenon for health care providers (HCPs). Exploring HCPs’ perceptions of participation in moral distress interventions using qualitative and quantitative methods enhances understanding of intervention effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to measure and describe the impact of a two-phased intervention on participants’ moral distress. Using a cross-over design, the project aimed to determine if the intervention would decrease moral distress, enhance moral agency, and improve perceptions about the work environment. We used quantitative instruments and (...) explored participants’ perceptions of the intervention using semi-structured interviews. Participants were from inpatient settings, within three major hospitals of a large, urban healthcare system in the Midwest, United States. Participants included nurses (80.6%) and other clinical care providers. Using generalized linear mixed modeling we assessed the change in each of the outcome variables over time controlling for groups. Interviews were audiotaped and professionally transcribed. The written narratives were coded into themes. The change in scores on study instruments trended in the desired direction however did not meet statistical significance. Qualitative interviews revealed that intervention effectiveness was derived from a combination of learning benefits, psychological benefits, and building community that promoted moral agency. Findings demonstrate a clear link between moral distress and moral agency and suggest that Facilitated Ethics Conversations can enhance the work environment. Findings provide insight for developing evidenced-based approaches to address moral distress of hospital nurses. (shrink)

The assembly of a bipolar spindle is essential for the accurate segregation of replicated chromosomes during cell division. Do chromosomes rely solely on other cellular components to regulate the assembly of the bipolar spindle or are they masters of their own fate? In the Zhang and Nicklas(1) study reviewed here, micromanipulation techniques and video microscopy were used to demonstrate the different roles that chromosome arms, kinetochores and centrosomes play in bipolar spindle assembly.