Abstract Energy typically is discussed in terms of science, technology, economics, and politics. Little attention has been given to fundamental religious and ethical questions surrounding the upcoming transition to renewable energy. The essays in this thematic section seek to redress that deficiency. This introductory essay raises some key questions and summarizes various presentations on energy and religion, as these were held at the 2010 conference of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS). Some presentations described the energy (...) landscape and provided data and perspectives needed for sound policy. Others raised ethical and religious considerations for energy decisions as the transition from nonrenewable to renewable sources is faced. Some posed the challenges of the energy transition to religion itself. Yet others offered examples of sustainable energy use and/or promising sources for meeting future needs sustainably. At the conclusion of the conference, presenters crafted a common “Statement on Energy and Climate Change” that includes a “Call to Action.” The “Energy Statement” follows as an appendix. (shrink)

This essay summarizes key insights across the essays in the Hastings Center Report's special report “Time to Rebuild: Essays on Trust in Health Care and Science.” These insights concern trust and trustworthiness as distinct concepts, competence as a necessary but not sufficient input to trust, trust as a reciprocal good, trust as an interpersonal as well as structural phenomena, the ethical impermissibility of seeking to win trust without being trustworthy, building and borrowing trust as distinct strategies, and challenges to trustworthiness (...) posed by the contingent nature of science. Together, these insights stand to advance an area of research that we believe has been historically stymied by conceptual confusion and a long‐standing insistence on treating trust as a purely instrumental good. (shrink)

"Jewish Bioethics" as currently formulated has been criticized as being of parochial concern, drawing on obscure methodology, employing an authoritarian (and, to the modern mind, unintelligible) method of discourse and as being of little relevance to the wider community. We analyze Jewish bioethics in terms of rule and principle theory and demonstrate that it is based on rational consideration and reproducible reasoning. This approach allows methodological and terminological translation into a Western method of discourse that, in turn, has much to (...) contribute to clarifying underlying principles and methods of application of modern bioethics. (shrink)

In the past decade, Ethiopia has demonstrated a strong ideological convention to the East-Asian model of ‘developmental state’, which stands for state-led industrialisation as its underlying industrial policy premise. Nevertheless, the labour rights externalities of this industrial policymaking have been overlooked in the existing academic and practical policy debates. Hence, using qualitative empirical data, the article attempts to address the research gap by analysing why and how Ethiopia’s state-led industrialisation and the corporate behaviours of apparel-exporting firms, as well as their (...) respective global brand buyers, have contributed to the existing poverty wages and repressive practices against the associational rights of local industrial workers at those selected apparel-exporting industrial parks of the country. The maxim of industrialisation with a human face has increasingly become a promising alternative to the neoclassical intellectual view of labour relations following its fundamentals towards achieving a more sustainable industrial development in a given state. In light of this human right imperative, the finding revealed Ethiopia’s stateled industrialisation has firmly embraced strong business-state alliances, thereby curbing the power of local industrial workers. The Ethiopian government employs diverse de facto or de jure labour control mechanisms across those selected apparel-exporting industrial parks of the country. This is manifested through poverty wages and repressive measures todeny the associational rights of workers. Further, the flawed Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of employing firms and their respective global brands have contributed to the ongoing labour abuses across those selected apparel-exporting firms. Hence, Ethiopia’s industrial policy is expected to navigate a reasonable balance between facilitating industrial catch-up and ensuring labour standards for more viable and sustainable labour relations. (shrink)

1988 : Does being a Christian physician really matter? / Edmund D. Pellegrino, response by John Robinson -- 1989: Clinical medical ethics: a review of the first decade / Mark Siegler, response by Maura Ryan -- 1990 : Who or what is an embryo? / Richard McCormick, response Margaret Monahan Hogan -- 1991: Euthanasia: Where is the debate going? / Daniel Callahan, response by Paul Weithman -- 1992: The moral inevitability of two tiers of health care / H. Tristram Engelhardt, (...) Jr., response by Joel James Shuman -- 1993: Compasionate care of the dying / James F. Bresnahan, response by John Young. (shrink)

Lennart Åqvist (1992) proposed a logical theory of legal evidence, based on the Bolding-Ekelöf of degrees of evidential strength. This paper reformulates Åqvist's model in terms of the probabilistic version of the kappa calculus. Proving its acceptability in the legal context is beyond the present scope, but the epistemological debate about Bayesian Law isclearly relevant. While the present model is a possible link to that lineof inquiry, we offer some considerations about the broader picture of thepotential of AI & Law (...) in the evidentiary context. Whereas probabilisticreasoning is well-researched in AI, calculations about the threshold ofpersuasion in litigation, whatever their value, are just the tip of theiceberg. The bulk of the modeling desiderata is arguably elsewhere, if one isto ideally make the most of AI's distinctive contribution as envisaged forlegal evidence research. (shrink)

Multidrug resistance resulting from expression of an energy‐dependent drug efflux pump encoded by the human MDR1 gene is a major impediment to effective cancer therapy. Pharmacologic intervention aimed at inhibiting this multidrug transporter should improve existing chemotherapy of human cancer, but drug development has been delayed by the difficulty and expense of developing valid animal models. Using recombinant DNA technology, a transgenic mouse has been engineered whose bone marrow is protected from the toxic effects of chemotherapy by expression of the (...) MDR1 gene. This animal system allows the rapid screening of drugs which inhibit the multidrug transporter and heralds a new era of using transgenic animals for pharmacologic screening. (shrink)

Holocaust education is important for learning how healthcare has been leveraged to influence social change in the past and how it can be used to advocate for ethical social change in the future. By understanding how medical professionals became the social and political leaders of Nazi Germany, today’s health professionals can learn how to avoid unethical politicization. By understanding how early twentieth century discourse on medico-social issues used terms and language that are similar, if not the same, as today’s debates, (...) proponents of different sides of these debates can understand the troubling subtexts and potential consequences of their – and the opposing side’s – positions. (shrink)

This article explores the relation between the expulsion of Jews from medieval England and France and state building, geo-politics, regime styles, and taxation in these countries. Jews were evicted as a result of attempts by kings to manage royal insecurity, refashion relations between state and society, and build more durable systems of taxation within the territories they claimed as theirs. As they engaged in state building and extended their ties, often conflictual, to key societal and political actors, Jews became financially (...) less important but more visible as outsiders, becoming a liability for the crown. Similar mechanisms were at work despite important differences distinguishing England’s growing regime of rights and representation and France’s emergent absolutist patrimonialism. (shrink)

This volume collects thirty years worth of articles on the emotions written by the distinguished philosopher Robert Solomon. Solomon's thesis is that we are significantly responsible for our emotions, which are evaluative judgments that in effect we choose. This is the first of several volumes that document work in the emotions.

The argument of this paper is that the Aristotelian analysis of justice and related concepts provides the best framework for understanding the structure and importance of justice in Dante’s Commedia. After giving a synopsis of the principle features of Aristotle’s account of justice in Book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics, I consider a few scenes from the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso, showing how the punishments and rewards Dante describes are based on the Aristotelian analysis of justice. Finally, I (...) show that Dante, following Aristotle’s views on the metaphysics of the human person, recognizes that argument alone is inadequate to the task of educating the reader on the proper care of the soul, and that Dante’s effective use of images, makes the abstract Aristotelian concept of justice vivid and attractive, and its opposite repulsive. (shrink)

For the last forty years, two claims have been at the core of disputes about scientific change: that scientists reason rationally and that science is progressive. For most of this time discussions were polarized between philosophers, who defended traditional Enlightenment ideas about rationality and progress, and sociologists, who espoused relativism and constructivism. Recently, creative new ideas going beyond the polarized positions have come from the history of science, feminist criticism of science, psychology of science, and anthropology of science. Addressing the (...) traditional arguments as well as building on these new ideas, Miriam Solomon constructs a new epistemology of science. After discussions of the nature of empirical success and its relation to truth, Solomon offers a new, social account of scientific rationality. She shows that the pursuit of empirical success and truth can be consistent with both dissent and consensus, and that the distinction between dissent and consensus is of little epistemic significance. In building this social epistemology of science, she shows that scientific communities are not merely the locus of distributed expert knowledge and a resource for criticism but also the site of distributed decision making. Throughout, she illustrates her ideas with case studies from late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century physical and life sciences. Replacing the traditional focus on methods and heuristics to be applied by individual scientists, Solomon emphasizes science funding, administration, and policy. One of her goals is to have a positive influence on scientific decision making through practical social recommendations. (shrink)