This is the first textbook of surgical ethics. It is a practical, clinically comprehenive, well-organized guide to ethical issues in surgical practice, research, and education written by leading figures in surgery and bioethics. The authors cover the surgeon-patient relationship, the full range of surgical patients, surgical education and research, and surgery and managed care. Their chapters are not abstract discussions of ethical principles; rather, they connect directly with the everyday concerns of practicing surgeons.

Moral psychology studies the features of cognition, judgement, perception and emotion that make human beings capable of moral action. Perspectives from feminist and race theory immensely enrich moral psychology. Writers who take these perspectives ask questions about mind, feeling, and action in contexts of social difference and unequal power and opportunity. These essays by a distinguished international cast of philosophers explore moral psychology as it connects to social life, scientific studies, and literature.

Following Jacques Hadamard, applied mathematicians typically investigate their models in the form of well-set problems, which actually consist of a family of applicational circumstances that vary in specific ways with respect to their initial and boundary values. The chief motive for investigating models in this wider manner is to avoid the improper behavioral conclusions one might reach from the consideration of a more restricted range of cases. Suitable specifications of the required initial and boundary variability typically appeal to previously established (...) experimental conclusions as to how the target system will behave under a range of eternally applied manipulations of the form “If the conditions pertaining to S were altered in manner M, internal features X would/would not alter”. In his investigations of causal reasoning within other parts of science, our first author has emphasized the conceptual importance of counterfactuals of this nature, for which he was been often criticized by authors of a self-styled “metaphysical” inclination. The purpose of this note is to argue, pace these objections, that closely analogous considerations have long been part of the practice of investigating differential equation models in a sensible way. (shrink)

Just health: meeting health needs fairly is an ambitious book, in which Norman Daniels attempts to bring together in a single framework all his work on health and justice from the past 25 years. One major aim is to reconcile his earlier work on the special moral importance of healthcare with his later work on the social determinants of health. In his earlier work, Daniels argued that healthcare is of special moral importance because it protects opportunity. In this later work, (...) Daniels argues that the social determinants of health (which in fact tend to have a larger effect on health outcomes than healthcare does) should also be considered special. This paper argues that it is a mistake to base a theory of justice for health on the claim that health (or the social determinants of health) are "special", for three reasons. First, once we realise that health is to a large part socially determined by features such as distribution of income, which are also of independent importance for justice, we cannot talk about a theory of justice for health in isolation from an overall theory of justice. Second, when we are trying to work out the place of health in a general theory of justice, being told that health (or the social determinants of health) is special is unhelpful. The relevant starting point should rather be whether health matters in a fundamental way for justice, or whether it matters merely for the effects it has on those goods which are of fundamental importance for justice. Third, treating the social determinants of health as special would in fact be counterproductive in terms of the broad approach to justice Daniels favours. (shrink)

The objective of the present text is to develop a reflection about the value of human life in today’s society bringing into focus the contrasting perspectives of the ordinary and the extraordinary of life. For that purpose, we emphasize the conception of the Catholic Church from the Second Vatican Council that suggests an attitude of a Pilgrim Church which longs for dialogue with human beings in their ordinary life (we intend to rescue the positive sense of the term "ordinary"), in (...) disadvantage of the triumphalist vision which gives priority to the great deeds of history. In that sense, we establish a dialogue with the literal work Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky whose protagonist Raskolnikov reveals himself through the contemporary dilemma between being and not being extraordinary in the eyes of the society. His moral conscience is tested after a crime he committed. The apex of this revelation takes place after the reading of the Gospel relating to the resurrection of Lazarus shared with Sonia, a flagrant sinner, an ordinary in the eyes of the society represented in the work. In fact, how it happens in the painful passage of Raskolnikov, God makes himself known through the other in borderline situations and we take him into account through the experience which a man of faith realizes when discovering Him to be present. The presence of God in the world is surely not to be understood in the sphere of the extraordinary, what matters is the experience of refuge when we are seduced by the faith. (shrink)

The infant mortality rate in Liberia is 50 times higher than it is in Sweden, whilst a child born in Japan has a life expectancy at birth of more than double that of one born in Zambia. 1 And within countries, we see differences which are nearly as great. For example, if you were in the USA and travelled the short journey from the poorer parts of Washington to Montgomery County Maryland, you would find that ‘for each mile travelled life (...) expectancy rises about a year and a half. There is a twenty-year gap between poor blacks at one end of the journey and rich whites at the other’. (Marmot, 2004, p.2). There are two types of questions which it is important to ask about inequalities in health such as these. The first are social scientific questions about the extent of inequalities in health and the factors which are causally responsible for these inequalities. Examples of social scientific questions to ask might be: how do infant mortality rates in the UK differ according to social class? What is the difference in life expectancy between Japanese who emigrate to the US and those who remain in Japan? Why do civil servants in higher ranked jobs tend to live longer than civil servants in lower ranked jobs? The second type are normative questions about the reasons we have to care about inequalities in health. Important normative questions to answer are: which inequalities in health should we care about (all inequalities or merely some of them)? When is an inequality in health unjust? How should we weigh our concern for equality in health against other factors such as maximising the.. (shrink)

These essays argue that to have good character one needs to have at least developed a sense of empathy and self control.

When we talk about intellectual property, it is often implicitly assumed that we are talking about private intellectual property. However, private property and the idea of private ownership do not exhaust the possibilities for accounts of ownership and of property. There are other ways that ownership can operate, such as common property. A resource is common property if its use is ‘governed by rules whose point is to make them available for use by all or any members of the society.’.

The research project described in this report represents one of the most extensive studies of character education ever undertaken, including over 10,000 students and 255 teachers in schools across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Research techniques consisted of a mixture of surveys, moral dilemmas and semi-structured interviews. This report explores: - The current situation in character education, both in the UK and internationally - How developed British students are with respect to moral character and the extent to which they (...) are able to understand and apply moral virtues, especially those aged 14 and 15 - How teachers in the UK understand their role in terms of students’ moral and character development - What helps or hinders the development of children’s characters according to teachers in UK schools. (shrink)

Examines the perennial issues that keep science and religion at arm's length, clarifies those issues, and fits them into an historical framework—from Plato, to Aquinas, to today's thinkers.

There is a need to better understand how individuals in different religious groups construct and maintain their worldviews. This study explores how religious practices, beliefs, and relationships create and sustain the worldviews of five British Muslims. Semi-structured interviews were inductively analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to idiographically explore the participants’ lived experiences. This analysis developed multiple subordinate themes that formed two superordinate themes: “Submitting to Allah” and “Being a British Muslim.” The participants’ experiences of being raised in Muslim families (...) strongly shaped their beliefs and they each strongly identify themselves as both Muslim and British. These important relationships taught them to follow the teachings of the Qur’an and to live their lives in submission to God. The analysis suggests the belief that the Qur’an is the authoritative and enduring revelation of God to mankind provided the core of their worldview and that this belief had far-reaching implications for every aspect of their lives. Their social relationships and religious practices both continually affirmed this fundamental belief in their sacred text and created a social reality in which the participants experienced God and submitted to the will of Allah. The combination of many different religious practices, social relationships, and personal experiences imbued the Qur’an with the power and authority to shape the participants’ lives and sustained their religious community. The participants’ intratextually fundamentalist approach to the Qur’an helped them create coherent worldviews that were filled with meaning and purpose. (shrink)

Thomas Jefferson and Philosophy: Essays on the Philosophical Cast of Jefferson’s Writings is a collection of essays on topics that relate to philosophical aspects of Jefferson’s thinking over the years. Much historical insight is given to ground the various philosophical strands in Jefferson’s thought and writing on topics such as political philosophy, moral philosophy, slavery, republicanism, wall of separation, liberty, educational philosophy, and architecture.

Democracy establishes relationships of political equality, ones in which citizens equally share authority over what they do together and respect one another as equals. But in today's divided public square, democracy is challenged by political thinkers who disagree about how democratic institutions should be organized, and by antidemocratic politicians who exploit uncertainties about what democracy requires and why it matters. Democratic Equality mounts a bold and persuasive defense of democracy as a way of making collective decisions, showing how equality of (...) authority is essential to relating equally as citizens. James Lindley Wilson explains why the US Senate and Electoral College are urgently in need of reform, why proportional representation is not a universal requirement of democracy, how to identify racial vote dilution and gerrymandering in electoral districting, how to respond to threats to democracy posed by wealth inequality, and how judicial review could be more compatible with the democratic ideal. What emerges is an emphatic call to action to reinvigorate our ailing democracies, and a road map for widespread institutional reform. Democratic Equality highlights the importance of diverse forms of authority in democratic deliberation and electoral and representative processes—and demonstrates how that authority rests equally with each citizen in a democracy. (shrink)

Philosophy & Public Affairs, Volume 50, Issue 2, Page 169-201, Spring 2022.

Book reviewed in this article: On Human Nature. By Edward O. Wilson.

Although Leibniz characterised himself in the “New Essays” as a “Platonic” as opposed to a “Democritean” philosopher, his intellectual relationship with the most famous of the Renaissance Neoplatonists, Marsilio Ficino, has received little attention. Here we review what can be thus far established regarding Leibniz’s acquaintance with portions of Ficino’s Opera omnia of 1576. We compare Ficino’s disenchantment with the atomistic materialism of Lucretius, which he had favoured in his youth, and his turn to Platonism for inspiration, with Leibniz’s own (...) reported disenchantment with Gassendi’s Epicurean atomism and his invention of a vitalistic monadology that, despite Leibniz’s reservations regarding Ficinian magic, resembles Ficinian nature philosophy in number of striking respects. (shrink)

Research involving human subjects is much more stringently regulated than many other nonresearch activities that appear to be at least as risky. A number of prominent figures now argue that research is overregulated. We argue that the reasons typically offered to justify the present system of research regulation fail to show that research should be subject to more stringent regulation than other equally risky activities. However, there are three often overlooked reasons for thinking that research should be treated as a (...) special case. First, research typically involves the imposition of risk on people who do not benefit from this risk imposition. Second, research depends on public trust. Third, the complexity of the moral decision making required favors ethics committees as a regulative solution for research. (shrink)

This work argues that philosophy is not just useful, but vital, for thinking coherently about priorities in health policy and public policy.