The COVID-19 pandemic swept through New York City swiftly and with devastating effect. The crisis put enormous pressure on all hospital services, including the clinical ethics consultation team. This report describes the recent experience of the ethics consultants and Columbia University Irving Medical Center during the COVID-19 surge and compares the case load and characteristics to the corresponding period in 2019. By reporting this experience, we hope to supplement the growing body of COVID-19 scientific literature and provide details of the (...) human toll the virus took on our hospitals and communities. We also aim to highlight the role of the clinical ethics consultant as well as areas of policy and law that may need to be addressed in order to be better prepared for a future public health crisis. (shrink)

Whether one's interests lie in psychological practice, counseling, research, or the classroom, psychologists today must deal with a broad range of ethical issues--from charging fees to maintaining a client's confidentiality, and from conducting research to respecting clients, colleagues, and students. Now in a new edition, Ethics in Psychology, the most widely read and cited ethics textbook in psychology, considers many of the ethical questions and dilemmas that psychologists encounter in their everyday practice, research, and teaching. The book has been completely (...) updated in response to evolving trends in psychological research and practice, as well as extensive changes in the American Psychological Association's ethics code. Taking a practical, common sense approach to ethics in modern-day psychological practice, this useful book offers constructive means for both preventing problems and resolving ethical predicaments. This new edition retains the key features which have contributed to its popularity, including extensive case studies that provide illustrative guidance on a wide variety of topics, such as fee setting, advertising for clients, research ethics, sexual attraction, classroom ethics, managed care issues, confidentiality, and much more. Highly readable, the book unites an accessible style with humorous anecdotes that highlight the human side of ethics and make the book a pleasure to read. Ethics in Psychology will be an indispensable guide to ethical decision-making for all psychologists and students in psychology. (shrink)

Recent discussion of Scanlon's account of value, which analyses the value of X in terms of agents' reasons for having certain pro-attitudes or contra-attitudes towards X, has generated the problem (WKR problem): this is the problem, for the buck-passing view, of being able to acknowledge that there may be good reasons for attributing final value to X that have nothing to do with the final value that X actually possesses. I briefly review some of the existing solutions offered to the (...) WKR problem, including those by Philip Stratton-Lake and Jonas Olson, and offer a new, better one, which accommodates all the relevant cases presented in the literature. (shrink)

Research on personality psychology is making important contributions to psychological science and applied psychology. This second edition of The Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology offers a one-stop resource for scientific personality psychology. It summarizes cutting-edge personality research in all its forms, including genetics, psychometrics, social-cognitive psychology, and real-world expressions, with informative and lively chapters that also highlight some areas of controversy. The team of renowned international authors, led by two esteemed editors, ensures a wide range of theoretical perspectives. Each research (...) area is discussed in terms of scientific foundations, main theories and findings, and future directions for research. The handbook also features advances in technology, such as molecular genetics and functional neuroimaging, as well as contemporary statistical approaches. An invaluable aid to understanding the central role played by personality in psychology, it will appeal to students, researchers, and practitioners in psychology, behavioral neuroscience, and the social sciences. (shrink)

Scalar utilitarianism, a form of utilitarianism advocated by Alastair Norcross, retains utilitarianism's evaluative commitments while dispensing with utilitarianism's deontic commitments, or its commitment to the existence or significance of moral duties, obligations and requirements. This article disputes the effectiveness of the arguments that have been used to defend scalar utilitarianism. It is contended that Norcross's central ‘Persuasion Argument’ does not succeed, and it is suggested, more positively, that utilitarians cannot easily distance themselves from deontic assessment, just as long as scalar (...) utilitarians admit – as they should do – that utilitarian evaluation generates normative reasons for action.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Should Utilitarianism Be Scalar?Volume 25, Issue 1GERALD LANG DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820812000295Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Should Utilitarianism Be Scalar?Volume 25, Issue 1GERALD LANG DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820812000295Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Should Utilitarianism Be Scalar?Volume 25, Issue 1GERALD LANG DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820812000295Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Republican liberty, as recently defended by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, characterises liberty in terms of the absence of domination, instead of, or in addition to, the absence of interference, as favoured by Berlin-style negative liberty. This article considers several claims made on behalf of republican liberty, particularly in Pettit's and Skinner's recent writings, and finds them wanting. No relevant moral or political concern expressed by republicans, it will be contended here, fails to be accommodated by negative liberty.

The problem of collective action is that each member of a group wants other members to make necessary sacrifices while he or she 'free rides', reaping the benefits of collective action without doing the work. Inevitably the end result is that no one does the work and the common interest is not realized. This book analyses the social pressure whereby groups solve the problem of collective action. The authors show that the problem of collective action requires a model of group (...) process and cannot be deduced from simple models of individual behaviour. They employ formal mathematical models to emphasize the role of small subgroups of especially motivated individuals who form the 'critical mass' that sets collective action in motion. The book will be read with special interest by sociologists, social psychologists, economists and political scientists. It will also be of concern to those in industrial relations and communications research working on issues in collective action and rational choice. (shrink)

One Rawlsian response to G. A. Cohen’s criticisms of justice as fairness which Cohen canvasses, and then dismisses, is the 'Freedom Objection'. It comes in two versions. The 'First Version' asserts that there is an unresolved trilemma among the three principles of equality, Pareto-optimality, and freedom of occupational choice, while the 'Second Version' imputes to Rawls’s theory a concern to protect occupational freedom over equality of condition. This article is mainly concerned with advancing three claims. First, the 'ethical solution' Cohen (...) advances against the First Version of the Freedom Objection does not grant a fair hearing to the Freedom Objection. Second, the distinction Cohen presses between the legal and moral right of occupational choice in his response to the Second Version cannot save him from worries about Stalinist coercion. Third, Cohen’s response to the First Version of the Freedom Objection is actually in tension with his response to the Second Version of the Freedom Objection. (shrink)

In a series of influential papers, John McDowell has argued that the rule‐following considerations explored in Wittgenstein’s later work provide support for a particularist form of moral objectivity. The article distinguishes three such arguments in McDowell’s writings, labelled the Anthropocentricism Argument, the Shapelessness Argument, and the Anti‐Humean Argument, respectively, and the author disputes the effectiveness of each of them. As far as these metaethical debates are concerned, the article concludes that the rule‐following considerations leave everything in their place.

This comprehensive reference guide includes over 140 entries on every aspect of Plato's thought.

Act-utilitarianism comes in two standard varieties: ‘subjective’ act-utilitarianism, which tells agents to attempt to maximize utility directly, and ‘objective’ act-utilitarianism, which permits agents to use non-utilitarian decision-making procedures. This article argues that objective actutilitarianism is exposed to a dilemma. On one horn of it is the contention that objective act-utilitarianism makes inconsistent claims about the rightness of acts. On the other horn of it is the contention that objective act-utilitarianism collapses back into what is, essentially, subjective act-utilitarianism. Three objective act-utilitarian (...) responses to this dilemma are explored and rejected. The recommended conclusion is that a consistent utilitarian must either embrace subjective act-utilitarianism, or abandon act-utilitarianism altogether. Key Words: act-utilitarianism • subjective • objective • decision-making procedure • criterion of rightness • dilemma. (shrink)

In this article, I appeal to the phenomenon of moral hazard in order to explain how at least some of the inequalities permitted by Luck Egalitarianism can be given an alternative, more plausible grounding than that which is supplied by Luck Egalitarianism. This alternative grounding robs Luck Egalitarianism of a potentially significant source of intuitive support whilst enabling conditional welfare policies to survive the attacks on them made by Elizabeth Anderson, Jonathan Wolff, and others.

The philosopher Stanley Cavell once asked, "Can a human being be free of human nature?" _On Ceasing to Be Human_ examines philosophical as well as literary texts and contexts, in which various senses of Cavell's question might be explored and developed. During the past thirty or so years, the very concept of "being human" has been called into question within such fields as cybernetics, animal-rights theory, analytic philosophy. This book examines these issues, but its main concern is the link between (...) freedom and nonidentity that Cavell's question implies, and which turns out to be a major concern among the thinkers Bruns takes up in this book: Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Jacques Derrida. Each of these is, in different ways, a philosopher of the "singular" for whom the singular cannot be reduced to concepts, categories, distinctions, or the rule of identity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 327-341 [Access article in PDF] The Rise of Postmodernisms and the "End of Science" Gerald Holton * [Errata]In a remarkable essay, "The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will," Isaiah Berlin leads up to a key question facing historians of ideas today. He begins with the observation that beliefs have entered our culture that "draw their plausibility" from a deep and radical (...) revolt against the central tradition of Western thought. That central tradition rested on the "pillars of the social optimism," which had found its fullest expression in the Enlightenment, "that the central problems of men are, in the end, the same throughout history; that they are in principle solvable; and that the solutions form a harmonious whole." 1But these pillars, Berlin notes, "came under attack toward the end of the eighteenth century by a movement first known in Germany as Sturm und Drang, and later in the many varieties of romanticism... and the many contemporary forms of irrationalism of both the right and the left, familiar to everyone today." In our time, in the alleged absence of "objective rules," the new rules are those made up by the rebels: "Ends are not... objective values," and "ends are not discovered at all but made, not found but created." And he concludes: "The prophets of the nineteenth-century predicted many things... but what none of them, so far as I know, predicted was that the last third of the twentieth century would be dominated by... the enthronement of the will of individuals or classes, and the rejection of reason and order as being prison houses of the spirit. How did this begin?" 2 As if to ensure that the question be considered central to the understanding of our age, Berlin adds that the explosion of irrationalism is one of the "outstanding characteristics of our century, the most demanding of explanation [End Page 327] and analysis." 3 Elsewhere he also appeals to seek the causes of "what appears to me to be the greatest transformation of Western consciousness, certainly in our time." 4Focusing my presentation chiefly on the aspects concerning science, one may well rephrase Berlin's question: how did it come about that we have passed again in many areas into what Susan Haack calls an "Age of Preposterism?" 5 -- that, for example, scientists, who are now in a period of spectacular advances of knowledge across the board, find a whole array of highly placed academics and journalists asserting that scientists' hopes to reach objective truths (two highly suspect words now) are in vain because there is no difference between the laws scientists find in nature and the arbitrary rules that govern baseball games; that science is "just one language game among others"; that we must "abolish the distinction between science and fiction"; that "The natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge"; and in any case, as the title of a current bestseller has it, we are at The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age." 6These are only a few glimpses, indicators of a stream of derogations, issuing from academe and the media. But happily, my concern here is not with the details of the current manifestation of what has been called the war on science but rather with examples of its historic lineage, with earlier phases of what Isaiah Berlin called the "Romantic Revolt." 7 Here we must begin our analysis by recognizing that any such multifaceted movement is best understood as a reaction against what went before, against what became so unsatisfactory or even intolerable as to cause the revolt.Historically, the most obvious and early reaction of this sort was the response to the breakthroughs in the seventeenth century that formed science and simultaneously signaled the great rupture from the ancient worldview, in which the individual, in principle, had been able to be both intellectually and spiritually comfortable. As one of the direct ancestors of romanticism, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744... (shrink)

This article is a response to criticisms of my book on Karl Marx’s Theory of History which were made by four authors in last December’s number of Analyse & Kritik. After clarifying (section 2) an ambiguity in an argument for historical materialism which is presented in the book, I contend (3-5), against objections raised by Philippe Van Parijs, that historical materialism is consistent only if it explains production relations functionally, by reference to their propensity to develop the productive forces. Next (...) (6-8) I address and rebut the views of Wal Suchting and Milton Fisk, who both think that the role of class struggle in historical materialism is larger than the one I assign to it. Finally (9-12) I try to vindicate the doctrine of base and superstructure proposed in my book against the skepticism of Steven Lukes. (shrink)

According to Saul Smilansky's ‘Paradox of Beneficial Retirement’, many serving members of professions may have decisive integrity-based reasons for retiring immediately. The Paradox of Beneficial Retirement holds that a below-par performance in one's job does not require any outright incompetence, but may take a purely relational form, in which a good performance is not good enough if it would be improved upon by someone else who would be appointed instead. It is argued, in response, that jobs in the sectors Smilansky (...) mentions are not merely positions to optimize the goals of the profession, but are professional careers in which there is the possibility of security and personal fulfilment. The article also explores connections between Smilansky's argument and G. A. Cohen's anti-incentives argument against Rawls. It is suggested that both thinkers underappreciate the relationship between personal reasons and institutional reasons. (shrink)

The ‘Responsibility Objection’ to Judith Thomson's famous argument for the permissibility of abortion challenges the relevance of her ‘Violinist Analogy’ to certain types of voluntary unwanted pregnancy, on the grounds that those pregnancies, even though they may be unwanted, are pregnancies for which the woman can be plausibly held responsible. This article considers the force of a number of recent objections to the Responsibility Objection, advanced by Harry Silverstein, David Boonin, and Jeff McMahan, and judges them to be unpersuasive. It (...) is concluded that, in the absence of further considerations, the Responsibility Objection carries force. (shrink)

Research Articles Gerald Dworkin, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

BackgroundTo limit selective and incomplete publication of the results of clinical trials, registries including ClinicalTrials.gov were introduced. The ClinicalTrials.gov registry added a results database in 2008 to enable researchers to post the results of their trials as stipulated by the Food and Drug Administration Amendment Act of 2007. This study aimed to determine the direction and magnitude of any change in publication proportions of registered breast cancer trials that occurred since the inception of the ClinicalTrials.gov results database.MethodsA cross-sectional study design (...) was employed using ClinicalTrials.gov, a publicly available registry/results database as the primary data source. Registry contents under the subcategories ‘Breast Neoplasms’ and ‘Breast Neoplasms, Male’ were downloaded on 1 August 2015. A literature search for included trials was afterwards conducted using MEDLINE and DISCOVER databases to determine publication status of the registered breast cancer trials.ResultsNearly half (168/340) of the listed trials had been published, with a median time to publication of 24 months (Q1 = 14 months, Q3 = 42 months). Only 86 trials were published within 24 months of completion. There was no significant increase in publication proportions of trials that were completed before the introduction of the results database compared to those completed after (OR = 1.00, 95 % CI =.61 to 1.63; adjusted OR = 0.84, 95 % CI =.51 to 1.39). Characteristics associated with publication included trial type (observational versus interventional adjusted OR =.28, 95 % CI =.10 to.74) and completion/termination status (terminated versus completed adjusted OR =.22, 95 % CI =.09 to.51).ConclusionsLess than a half of breast cancer trials registered in ClinicalTrials.gov are published in peer-reviewed journals. (shrink)

In this study, we investigate the impact of frequent service learning on the emotional, personal development, and leadership characteristics of business students at a Catholic university in the United States. We examine the aforementioned impact of frequent service learning through a novel panel data set provided by the University’s Institute for Leadership and Service, ranging from the years 2008 through 2015. Specifically, we conduct an empirical analysis across the emotional, personal development, and leadership dimensions, and examine the too-much-of-a-good-thing effect of (...) Pierce and Aguinis in relation to service learning. Our results suggest that business students experience statistically significant increases in several emotional, personal development, and leadership dimensions as the number of service learning experiences increases. We provide mixed evidence of the TMGT effect when aggregating the emotion and personal development dimensions against the number of service-learning experiences via examination of cross-dimensional averages. Our study yields implications for the optimal number of service learning projects for business schools. (shrink)

When accidents occur and people suffer injuries, who ought to bear the loss? Tort law offers a complex set of rules to answer this question, but up to now philosophers have offered little by way of analysis of these rules. In eight essays commissioned for this volume, leading legal theorists examine the philosophical foundations of tort law. Amongst the questions they address are the following: how are the notions at the core of tort practice to be understood? Is an explanation (...) based on a conception of justice feasible? How are concerns of distributive and corrective justice related? What amounts to an adequate explanation of tort law? This collection will be of interest to professionals and advanced students working in philosophy of law, social theory, political theory, and law, as well as anyone seeking a better understanding of tort law. (shrink)