The debate over futility is driven, in part, by physicians' desire to recover some measure of decision-making authority from their patients. The standard approach begins by noting that certain interventions are futile for certain patients and then asserts that doctors have no obligation to provide futile treatment. The concept of futility is a complex one, and many commentators find it useful to distinguish ‘physiological futility’ from ‘qualitative futility’. The assertion that physicians can decide to withhold physiologically futile treatment generates little (...) controversy. The claim that they can withhold qualitatively futile treatment runs afoul of standard objections to medical paternalism. There is reason to believe that the conceptual distinction will not be maintained in clinical practice. This paper contends that the scientific data which would support a physician's unilateral decision to withhold physiologically futile treatment also provide support for an institutional policy restricting access to the treatment. The data the doctor uses to take decision-making power out of the hands of the patient can be used by the administrator to take power out of the hands of the doctor. While this loss of power is unproblematic, there is reason to believe that the ambiguity in the term ‘futility’ will allow a much greater loss of physicians' power. Keywords: futility, physician authority CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This paper outlines the development and implementation of a new course in Engineering Ethics at the University of Tennessee. This is a three-semester-hour course and is jointly taught by an engineering professor and a philosophy professor. While traditional pedagogical techniques such as case studies, position papers, and classroom discussions are used, additional activities such as developing a code of ethics and student-developed scenarios are employed to encourage critical thinking. Among the topics addressed in the course are engineering as a profession (...) and its role in society; ethical successes and failures; risk, safety, and the environment; professional responsibilities; credit and intellectual property; and international concerns. (shrink)

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less urgent (...) for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so. (shrink)

Expounds on the relationship between theory and practice as applied, adjusted, and inaugurated in health care.

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less urgent (...) for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so. (shrink)

Why do people comply with coronavirus disease 2019 public health guidance? This study considers cultural-psychological foundations of variation in beliefs about motivations for such compliance. Specifically, we focused on beliefs about two sources of prosocial motivation: desire to protect others and obligation to society. Across two studies, we observed that the relative emphasis on the desire to protect others as an explanation for compliance was greater in the United States settings associated with cultural ecologies of abstracted independence than in Chinese (...) settings associated with cultural ecologies of embedded interdependence. We observed these patterns for explanations of psychological experience of both others and self, and for compliance with mandates for both social distancing and face masks. Discussion of results considers both practical implications for motivating compliance with public health guidance and theoretical implications for denaturalizing prevailing accounts of prosocial motivation. (shrink)

Many people assume that the topic of this paper -- namely, what the media does to ensure that knowledge is limited in a democracy -- is almost an obsolete topic, because with the internet and the proliferation of multiple other sources, it is really no longer the case that we are forced to rely upon a very small and homogenous set of sources. There's no denying that, theoretically at least, we all now have the ability -- at least those of (...) us with internet access have the ability -- to circumvent the media's control over the information that we receive and to deliberately seek out a much wider range of political perspective. The problem, though, is that the only way that one will do that is if one believes that there is actually a reason to do it. In order to be sufficiently motivated to seek out such information, one must believe that there is certain information that we are either not getting, or are being somehow impeded from accessing; or conversely, that the set of information that we do get from the American media and the dominant corporations that control media discussions provide a basically full and truthful picture of the world. We have a very recent, significant example, where most of us know that, in fact, our political knowledge and political information were extremely limited and distorted and manipulated:the run-up to the Iraq War. It wasn't just that people were mistaken, but rather, that information was controlled -- first by the government and then with the aid of the media. That fact has become a fairly mainstream view, because the control and the manipulation were so blatant that even the most mainstream sources were forced to talk about and confront it and acknowledge it. (shrink)

This paper offers a listing of references to religious ethics in recent Anglo-American philosophical literature, organized in terms of a critical analysis of the main lines of argument to be found there. The principal focus is on metaethics, although references are included to other aspects of religious ethics. The author maintains that the case for a logical and/or a linguistic relation between religion and ethics is much stronger than is generally recognized in the philosophical discussions of these issues.

Tillich holds an ontologically based self-realization theory of ethics. For him ethics is neither logically nor linguistically tied to theology, but is in a certain sense epistemologically dependent. Tillich's material analysis of moral judgments is claimed to be inconsistent with his critique of heteronomous morality. The author concludes that Tillich has not given good reasons for rejecting a heteronomous divine - command theory of morality.

One very common tactic for enforcing political orthodoxies is to malign the character, "style" and even mental health of those who challenge them. The most extreme version of this was an old Soviet favorite: to declare political dissidents mentally ill and put them in hospitals. In the US, those who take even the tiniest steps outside of political convention are instantly decreed "crazy", as happened to the 2002 anti-war version of Howard Dean and the current iteration of Ron Paul (in (...) most cases, what is actually "crazy" are the political orthodoxies this tactic seeks to shield from challenge). (shrink)

Professions have traditionally treated advocacy as a collective duty, best assigned to professional associations to perform. In North American nursing, advocacy for issues affecting identifiable patients is assigned instead to their nurses. We argue that nursing associations’ withdrawal from advocacy for patient care issues is detrimental to nurses and patients alike. Most nurses work in large institutions whose internal policies they cannot influence. When these create obstacles to good care, the inability of nurses to affect change can result in avoidable (...) distress for them and for their patients. We illustrate this point with a case study: the circumstances of the death of Michael Joseph LeBlanc, an inmate at Kingston Penitentiary Regional Hospital (Ontario). We conclude that patients and their nurses will suffer unnecessarily unless or until nursing associations cease to burden individual nurses with the responsibility for patient advocacy. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 3, Page 46-48, March 2012.

The liver was used widely in early studies of polarised transport but has been largely overlooked in recent years, mostly because of the development of epithelial cell lines which provide more tractable experimental systems. The majority of membrane proteins and lipids reach the hepatocyte apical membrane by transcytosis and it remains unclear whether there is a direct route for apical targeting, although the pathways present have yet to be fully characterised. The recent development of systems that allow hepatocyte transport processes (...) to be studied in culture and the observation that transcytosis can be significantly stimulated under physiological conditions suggest that hepatocytes have a role to play in future studies of polarised transport. This review discusses the known features of polarised membrane traffic in hepatocytes and contrasts them with the characteristics of vesicular transport in other epithelial cell types. (shrink)

What were Shakespeare's final thoughts on history, tragedy, and comedy? Shakespeare's Last Plays focuses much needed scholarly attention on Shakespeare's "Late Romances." The work--a collection of newly commissioned essays by leading scholars of classical political philosophy and literature--offers careful textual analysis of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, All is True, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The essays reveal how Shakespeare's thought in these final works compliments, challenges, fulfills, or transforms previously held conceptions of the playwright (...) and his political-philosophical views. (shrink)

L’auteur situe l’intérêt intense suscité par les Présocratiques en Allemagne dans les années 1920 dans le contexte de la philologie classique tout en le reconduisant au mouvement de fascination pour l’« archaïque » apparu au cours du dernier quart du xixe siècle. L’auteur montre que ce phénomène trouve sa source dans l’« invention » des Présocratiques par Nietzsche, au point que la réception des Présocratiques, notamment d’Héraclite, peut être considérée comme une réception déguisée de Nietzsche, ce qui éclaire d’un jour (...) nouveau l’invocation du « premier commencement » grec dans le Discours de rectorat de Heidegger.The author situates the interest in Pre-Socratic philosophy in Germany in the 1920s in regard to classical philology, linking this renewal to a fascination with the « archaic » that arose at the end of the 19th century. Critical here is the way this phenomena is rooted in a modern « invention » of Pre-Platonic thinkers through Nietzsche, one that culminates with figures such as Heraclitus functioning as a mask for Nietzsche reception, a philological and hermeneutical situation which illuminates the topic of the « first Greek beginning » in Heidegger’s Rectorial Address. (shrink)

1. Considérations préliminaires : pourquoi des fragments? Éditer les plus anciens philosophes grecs – plus précisément, les philosophes antérieurs à Platon – signifie dans presque tous les cas éditer non pas des textes complets qui nous seraient intégralement parvenus plus ou moins sous la forme dans laquelle leurs auteurs les ont composés, mais bien plutôt une combinaison de citations indirectes, de longueur variable, que des auteurs postérieurs ont faites de leurs œuvres, des paraphrases,...