Fried provides a conventional exposition of deontological ethics. The accentuated polemical tone directed against consequentialism fills the reader with expectations of imminently coming upon a novel line of argumentation advancing the cause of deontology—but he is only to be disappointed.

My topic is authenticity in or perhaps as painting, not the authenticity of paintings; I know next to nothing about the problem of verifying claims of authorship. I am interested in another kind of genuineness and fraudulence, the kind at issue when we say of a person that he or she is false, not genuine, inauthentic, lacks integrity, and, especially when we say he or she is playing to the crowd, playing for effect, or is a poseur. These are not (...) quite moral distinctions (no one has a duty to be authentic), but they are robustly normative appraisals, applicable even when such falseness is not a case of straight hypocrisy but of lack of self-knowledge or of self-deceit. (A person can be quite sincere and not realize the extent of her submission to the other’s expectations and demands.) This sort of appraisal also has a long history in post-Rousseauist reflections on the dangers of uniquely modern forms of social dependence, and they are prominent worries in the modern novel. (shrink)

A critical examination of the religious theories of Axel Hägerström and Anders Nygren, their respective disciples, Martin Fries and Ragnar Bring, and the critical literature on the two main figures. Hemberg's study focuses on the questions: whether all reality must be referred to spatial-temporal experience; the status of metaphysics; and the nature of religious experience. The religious theories of Hägerström and Nygren are of considerable philosophical interest although, for primarily linguistic reasons, their influence outside Sweden has remained slight. Despite (...) the presence of a fifteen page English summary one suspects that interest in Hemberg's book will be similarly provincial, for similar reasons.—A. E. J. (shrink)

This paper explores The New Rhetoric’s concept of universal audience in the contexts of philosophical and traditional rhetorical discourse. It argues that, since Perelman’s final English-language article, published in 1984 to clarify misunderstandings among rhetorical scholars about his theory, rhetorical scholars have persisted in three primary misconceptions of the concept of universal audience: appeals to the real are made only to universal audiences, only universal audiences are qualified to establish the reasonableness of arguments, and only universal audiences prevent The New (...) Rhetoric’s rhetorical theory from degenerating into relativism. It explains why each of these misconceptions is inaccurate and provides a corrected view of universal audience that places it exclusively in the province of philosophical discourse. Finally, it questions whether constructed audiences in general add explanatory power to rhetorical analyses or are merely unnecessary constructs that should be dispensed with for the sake of theoretical parsimony. (shrink)

Purpose: Explore public attitudes towards the trade-offs between justice and medical outcome inherent in organ allocation decisions.Background: The US Task Force on Organ Transplantation recommended that considerations of justice, autonomy and medical outcome be part of all organ allocation decisions. Justice in this context may be modeled as a function of three types of need, related to age, clinical urgency, and quality of life.Methods: A web-based survey was conducted in which respondents were asked to choose between two hypothetical patients who (...) differed in clinical urgency , age, pretransplant and post-transplant quality of life, and life expectancy.Results: A pool of 1600 people were notified via email about the survey; 623 responded. Respondents preferred giving organs to younger people up to an age difference of <15.4 years and more clinically urgent people up to a difference in urgency of <2.54 months . Priority varied with the quality of life of the worst-off patient and the relative status of the patients. If both had worse than average quality of life, respondents preferred the better-off patient. When both had better than average quality of life, they preferred the worse-off patient. In analysis according to age versus clinical urgency, the older the patient, the more urgency needed to receive priority. In quality of life versus clinical urgency, the better the control’s quality of life, the more urgency the competing patient required. The worse the patient’s post-transplant outcome, the more urgency needed to receive priority.Conclusions: It appears that clinical urgency is only one of many factors influencing attitudes about allocation decisions and that respondents may invoke different principles of fairness depending the relative clinical status of patients. (shrink)

Previous research has found that people make religious attributions under certain conditions. In this study, we used causally ambiguous vignettes to confirm some previous findings regarding religious attributions and extend these findings by testing: whether implicit priming increased the odds of making causal attributions, and whether atheists also exhibit an attribution bias. Like previous studies, we found that people who were less religious were substantially less likely to make religious causal attributions. Unlike previous studies, we found that atheists were more (...) likely to attribute events to probability and/or luck. We also found, like previous studies, that religious people were more likely to make causal attributions when presented with vignettes involving health-related or life-and-death situations but not with quotidian events, like losing one's keys. Finally, we found no effect for implicit religious priming. (shrink)

Medical education at the Colombian School of Medicine has undergone a reconceptualization and reorganization so as to encompasses three fundamental elements of medical practice: 1) development of general abilities and standards necessary for appropriate professional medical practice; 2) technical education which makes it possible to utilize the bases that science and technology have provided for the development and application of knowledge, and in turn, to expand this base through research and development; and 3) humanistic education to guide students into ethical (...) professional practice. (shrink)

The recent far-reaching developments of Physics have produced the widespread impression that all those ideas of mechanics and mechanism, which were so influential in the nineteenth century, have now been completely abandoned, because they have proved to be quite inadequate as explanations, or even as mere descriptions, of the ultimate constitution of the physical world. “Has not modern physics”, asks Prof. Millikan, “thrown the purely mechanistic view of the universe root and branch out of its house?“ It is frequently contended, (...) still further, that the place of these concepts has been taken by others, very closely approximating to biological, or even to psychological, interpretations of all natural phenomena; the physics of today, in short, and yet more of tomorrow, is essentially non-mechanical. (shrink)