BackgroundNo standard method exists to assess how many consults a healthcare ethics consultation (HCEC) service should perform. To address this, we developed a method to estimate the volume of HCEC services based on a mixed-methods approach that included a systematic review and survey data on the volume of consult services requested.MethodsOur investigation included a systematic review of studies that reported the volume of HCEC services that were requested from 2000 to 2017, institutional surveys, and statistical analyses that estimated the volume (...) of HCEC services that were adjusted to the size of the hospitals in the survey and to population acuity.ResultsWe contacted the authors of 19 studies that met our inclusion criteria; 17 authors responded to the institutional survey and five provided annualized data points. We found that standard methods of reporting the volume of HCEC services led to inaccuracies in estimating the growth of HCEC services over time. To rectify this, we proposed two means to estimate volume based on either the service goals of HCEC services or hospital size and acuity.DiscussionThe statistical limitations of our study highlight the need to standardize the sharing and reporting of data in clinical ethics. Future work should further standardize methods of HCEC quality assessment using measures similar to those we describe. (shrink)

I examine here whether reliability is a defining feature of (moral or intellectual) virtues. I argue (1) that reliability is not a defining feature of a virtue where virtues are conceived (as they often are) as “personal excellences,” but (2) that there is another (also intuitive and familiar) conception of a virtue according to which reliability is a defining feature. I also argue (3) that even on the former conception, a certain rational belief pertaining to reliability is essential and (4) (...) that reliability itself, while not a defining feature of a virtue thus conceived, nevertheless is a concomitant of it. (shrink)

_The Critical Thinking Book_ covers not only standard topics such as definitions, fallacies, and argument identification, but also other pertinent themes such as consumer choice in a market economy and political choice in a representative democracy. Interesting historical asides are included throughout, as are images, diagrams, and reflective questions. A wealth of exercises is provided, both within the text and on a supplemental website for instructors. The author also offers additional exercises, videos, and other teaching and study materials that can (...) be digitally integrated into Learning Management Systems. (shrink)

The significance of educational research is today predicated on its ability to engage with the ecological, economic, and political challenges of the anthropocene, for where we might take seriously education’s commitment to the future necessitates a sustained encounter with the implications and questions raised in the wake of ‘our’ mutated planetary ecology. To repeat in the image of those educational practices, models and patterns of thinking that have contributed to the contemporary ecological crisis of the planet falls gravely short of (...) apprehending what it might entail to live in the contemporary moment. Yet further, where education is intimate to teleology, it is today clear that the image of the future posited educationally has fallen out of synch with the ‘outside thought’ of ecocatastrophe, or rather, our being ‘thought’ from the inhuman perspective of a planet destined to go on without us. Educationally, this threat poses a quite remarkable opportunity, for where human thought might be doomed to extinction, the question of how and where we might think assumes urgency. In this vein, this essay explores the wisdom that ‘we’ are and will be thought from perspectives alien to human desire becomes a catalyst for how educational research might be rethought otherwise in a more-than-human world. (shrink)

Puts Schelling in conversation with twentieth-century continental philosophy.

The third world war -- Planetary emergency -- The neo-eugenic world state -- Robotics & virtual reality -- The Persian Gulf of the 21st-century -- Aryan Imperium (Iran-Shahr) -- The Indo-European world order.

Evolutionary discussions regarding the relationship between social status and fertility in the contemporary U.S. typically claim that the relationship is either negative or absent entirely. The published data on recent generations of Americans upon which such statements rest, however, are solid with respect to women but sparse and equivocal for men. In the current study, we investigate education and income in relation to age at first child, childlessness, and number of children for men and women in two samples—one of the (...) general American population and one of graduates of an elite American university. We find that increased education is strongly associated with delayed childbearing in both sexes and is also moderately associated with decreased completed or near-completed fertility. Women in the general population with higher adult income have fewer children, but this relationship does not hold within all educational groups, including our sample with elite educations. Higher-income men, however, do not have fewer children in the general population and in fact have lower childlessness rates. Further, higher income in men is positively associated with fertility among our sample with elite educations as well as within the general population among those with college educations. Such findings undermine simple statements on the relationship between status and fertility. (shrink)

Quantitative analysts or “Quants” are a source of competitive advantage for financial institutions. They occupy the relatively powerful but often misunderstood role of modeling, structuring, and pricing complex financial instruments in the capital markets. But Quants often function in a discipline free from ethical burdens. Models used to price complex instruments are usually beyond the mathematical understanding of financial sector participants who rely heavily on the integrity of the Quant who built them. Although there has been some attempt to cover (...) the ethics of mathematics applied to the capital markets, designing a set of rules to guide the ethical behavior of Quants cannot be made explicit and remains inexpressible. Because Quants generally experience a sense of detachment from moral obligation, there is a growing need to convert moral detachment into engagement. Our framework is indebted to key elements of Wittgenstein’s practical ethics philosophy and Rawls’ justice principle. The burden of balancing justice as fairness as defined by Rawls with the inability to explicitly articulate ethical rules as defined by Wittgenstein must fall to the Quant. We propose that the threshold delineating the barrier between ethical detachment and engagement can only be defined by the Quants themselves. It is their moral duty to disclose their level of ethical engagement when their models are put into practice. (shrink)

These 14 essays bring Schelling in tune with such luminaries as Heidegger, Derrida, Bataille, Foucault, Deleuze, Levinas, and Irigaray and situate him squarely in the centre of current themes.

This essay re-problematises the Aristotelian concept of techne in terms of the mathematical function to demonstrate the centrality of agency in technics. This schema animates computational theory as an agential operator or computer, to situate agency’s necessity to the technical apparatus and the production of abstract relations.

A recurring criticism of Isaiah Berlin is that he is a relativist. This essay argues that such criticisms are misplaced, as they fail to account for Berlin’s views about a common human horizon and the sense of reality. Berlin distinguishes his position from two forms of relativism – epistemological and cultural – and argues that the first entails self‐contradiction, while the other precludes mutual understanding. In response, he highlights the importance of a human horizon which involves shared moral values, and (...) provides for the possibility of mutual comprehension. Such comprehension is attained by the use of the sense of reality, which is taken to illuminate the differences and similarities between those of different beliefs. (shrink)

Essays exploring a rich intersection between phenomenology and idealism with contemporary relevance.

This paper addresses the question of the earth. I center this effort on a reading of the figure of animality in the writings of Nietzsche and Bataille. I begin by accepting one of the decisive questions (die Entscheidungen) that Heidegger poses in the Beiträge zur Philosophie: "Whether nature is degraded to the exploitative place of calculation and furnishing and to an opportunity to 'have an experience' or whether nature as the self-closing Earth bears the opening of a world without image." (...) In an attempt to think the Earth, I argue that the human as a natural kind emerges in denial or flight from animality. Animality renders natural kinds porous. It does not congeal into a categorically delimitable operation, but rather interrupts and multiplies such operations. Moreover, they multiply them with what Nietzsche called "transvaluative" force. Animality contests the closure of a discourse on kinds of animals. (shrink)

This is a philosophical rumination on Shawn Loht’s important extension of “film as philosophy” into a Heideggerian phenomenological account of the philosophical response that cinema can engender. After considering the importance of these kinds of approaches, I turn to Loht’s phenomenological engagement with Terrence Malick’s early masterpiece, Days of Heaven (1978). After sympathetically reviewing his “interpretation”, I expand upon its delineation of “earth and world” to include the “fallenness” of the world as well as the possibility of a metanōetic awakening (...) to the vocation of “mud doctor”, that is, to heal the rift between earth and world, a rift made more exigent by world war, economic exploitation, and the ecological catastrophe of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

The field of clinical bioethics strongly advocates for the use of advance directives to promote patient autonomy, particularly at the end of life. This paper reports a study of clinical bioethicists’ perceptions of the professional consensus about advance directives, as well as their personal advance care planning practices. We find that clinical bioethicists are often sceptical about the value of advance directives, and their personal choices about advance directives often deviate from what clinical ethicists acknowledge to be their profession’s recommendations. (...) Moreover, our respondents identified a pluralistic set of justifications for completing treatment directives and designating surrogates, even while the consensus view focuses on patient autonomy. Our results suggest important revisions to academic discussion and public-facing advocacy about advance care planning. (shrink)

More than 20 years ago, the pioneering pediatric ethicist William Bartholome wrote a fiery letter to the editor of this journal because he thought a recently published statement on pediatric assent, from the Committee on Bioethics of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), showed insufficient respect for children. That AAP statement, like its 2016 update, asserts that pediatric assent should be solicited only when a child’s dissent will be honored. Bartholome objected that pediatricians should always solicit children’s assent and that (...) they should acknowledge and apologize when they treat children over their objections even when they must do so to promote children’s best interests. We think Bartholome was right. In this brief commentary, we elaborate on his perspective about the moral value of pediatric assent, and we suggest improvements to the corresponding clinical guidance. (shrink)

Philosophy after comparative philosophy -- Thinking about Nietzsche and Zen -- Strange saints (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hakuin) -- Convalescence (Nietzsche, James, Hakuin) -- Nietzsche in the pure land (Nietzsche, Shinran, Tanabe) -- Planomenal nourishment (Nietzsche, Deleuze, Dogen) -- Pure experience and philosophy after comparative philosophy.

This book concerns the nature of time and ordinary cases of persistence in Spinoza. The author argues for three major interpretive claims. First, that Spinoza is committed to an eternalist theory of time whereby all things (whether they seem to be past, present, or future) are equally real. Second, that a mode’s conatus or essence is a self-maintaining activity (not an inertial force or disposition.) Third, that modes persist through time in Spinoza’s metaphysics by having temporal parts (that is, different (...) parts at different times.) If this is correct, then a significant reinterpretation of Spinoza’s modal metaphysics is required. The book also puts Spinoza into dialogue with some recent work in analytic metaphysics. (shrink)

This is an essay on place in light of the ecological crisis as an exercise in what Pierre Charbonnier has recently called ecological reason, that is, “the environmental reflexivity of our species.” How do the roots of our prevailing political and economic relationships to the many lands that sustain us appear retroactively from the perspective of ecological reason? In a kind of tragic reversal, the mad rush to global prosperity and political dignity now appears as the emerging catastrophe of our (...) failure to heed the terrestrial affordances that sustain us. I explicate this problem and root about for responses to it by lacing together the recent work of Charbonnier as well as John Sallis, Bruno Latour, and Brian Burkhart in a single weave of place-specific thinking. How can we begin to rethink place from the ground up? (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the "mysterious" distinction which separates Spinoza's attributes might be a Scholastic "intermediate" distinction similar to Henry of Ghent's intentional distinction. My argument for this conclusion takes place in three sections. In section one, I contrast the nature of Henry's intentional distinction with Scotus's formal distinction. In section two, I deduce the nature of Spinoza's "mysterious" distinction from Descartes's real and conceptual distinctions and recast the problem concerning the nature of the attributes. In section three, (...) I argue that the attributes are likely intentionally distinct. (shrink)

This paper investigates the fragmentation required of the philosophy of history in light of three key moments in its formation: German Idealism’s desire to see freedom realized in the world, the death of God, and the disasters of the twentieth century. I argue that Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot respond to these threads of the philosophy of history with revolutionary imperatives that belong to no program or project, imperatives that both reorganize and destructure the work of education, affirmations of transience (...) and unmediated violence. I argue, following their lead, that any philosophy of history today must begin in a refusal of state power and the mediated violence of contemporary forms of community. (shrink)

This essay seeks to explicate the ethical dimension of Schelling’s project. Schelling complicates the theory/praxis distinction by arguing that these two modalities are different sides of the same movement in thinking. I attempt to establish this by first examining Schelling’s early essay, Neue Deduktion des Naturrechts, and then by turning to his celebrated Freedom essay. Although I chiefl y examine an early work and then a work from his middle period, I contend that the ethical dimension governs all of Schelling’s (...) thinking. I examine closely Schelling’s description of Mitwissenschaft (the conscience). I further develop my argument by contrasting Nietzsche’s understanding of this notion with Heidegger’s treatment of it in Being and Time. I then turn to Hannah Arendt and her discussion of “radical evil” and the “conscience” in order to deepen our appreciation of Schelling’s watershed contribution. (shrink)

As is well known, the renowned Hegel scholar, Franz Rosenzweig, had a dramatic break with Hegel in particular and German Idealism more broadly, as strikingly evidenced in his magnum opus, The Star of Redemption. In the third or 1815 draft of Die Weltalter, Schelling writes that while “all thinking must begin the dialectic, it cannot end in the dialectic.” Schelling continued his turn toward what he called “positive philosophy,” which emerges “toto caelo” differently than from the “universality” and “indeterminacy” of (...) negative thought. What is this new mode of thought, born—both for Schelling and for his unexpected admirer Rosenzweig—from the limitations of negative thought? How does one characterize this rupture within Idealism itself? (shrink)

The essay seeks to bring William James into dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche around the issue of the nature of sickness, and its overcoming or convalescence. It is, at first glance, folly to reconcile religious rebirth with the convalescence that led Nietzsche to the “great health.” To try and see beyond this folly, we will consider carefully the site in which health emerges for both thinkers. This discussion is further motivated by an interest in the prospects for religion after the death (...) of God. (shrink)

In the United States of America, and in much of the world, corporations are afforded a great deal of rights to both protect themselves and others against legal action and mistreatment. To gain these rights, they defended themselves or were defended many times throughout the years in courts under the framework of “legal personhood”—but this same legal personhood is not afforded to most actual living creatures. There is enough similarity in the legal framework afforded to corporations that should be afforded (...) to animals as well, and more than enough evidence to show that it is increasingly necessary to protect and expand animal rights in this way. The argument is simple: because of their sentience, cognition, and emotional intelligence, animals deserve legal personhood. If we can make the argument that a corporation, which is incapable of these things listed above, should have certain unalienable rights, then it is illogical for us to make the argument that animals should not. (shrink)

Callous unemotional (CU) traits (i.e., a lack of empathy/remorse and poverty of emotion) that co-occur with childhood antisocial behaviour are believed to be the developmental precursor to psychopathy in adulthood. An increasing volume of evidence supports two distinct variants of CU traits/psychopathy, known as primary and secondary. Primary variants are thought to show core deficits in emotional reactivity (e.g., attenuated autonomic activity), whereas secondary variants present with high levels of anxiety and this may be reflected in increased emotional sensitivity to (...) negative stimuli. -/- Aims: The current study is the first of its kind to examine the role of anxiety in modulating emotional processing as indexed by heart rate (HR) in incarcerated boys with CU traits. -/- Methods: HR was recorded continuously while 205 adolescents (aged 14 to 18 years) completed an emotional pictures dot-probe task. The task consisted of four blocks of 18 trials, beginning with a 500 ms central fixation cross, a 250 ms picture pair presentation (i.e., neutral, positive, negative valence), followed by a probe appearing in either the top or bottom picture location until response, and lastly a 2000 ms inter-trial interval recovery period. Four groups were formed on the basis of median-split scores on the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale and the Inventory of Callous Unemotional Traits, reflecting a primary variant (high CU/low anxiety), secondary variant (high CU/high anxiety), and two nonpsychopathic groups (low CU/high anxiety and low CU/low anxiety). -/- Results: The HR data indicated relative HR deceleration during the picture-probe period, regardless of group. Additionally, compared to all other groups, HR deceleration was greatest for the high CU/high anxiety secondary group and smallest for the high CU/low anxiety primary group during negative stimuli. Conclusions: This result is thought to reflect differences between CU/psychopathy variants in attentional orienting to distressing stimuli, consistent with theory. (shrink)

Abstract:Despite his ridicule of Schelling, Nietzsche’s thought is in much greater proximity to Schelling’s philosophy than he realized. This essay explores this surprising and mutually illuminating relationship and concludes by arguing that this unexpected resonance exposes a sensibility, both fundamental and practical, to approach the reigning ecological crisis.

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called 'division'. The fallacy of division occurs when one incorrectly infers that the characteristics, attributes, or features of the group as a whole will also be found in the individuals comprising the group. The easiest way to avoid this fallacy is never to assume that the characteristics, attributes, or features of the group as a whole will also be found in the individuals comprising the group. One must inspect (...) and evaluate the characteristics, attributes, or features of the whole separately from the parts of which the whole is comprised. Inferences from a whole to a part can be made, however, if additional assumptions are added to the argument that link together the property had by the whole with the property had by the part. (shrink)

This paper concerns Spinoza’s theory of conatus and an important consequence of this theory concerning how bodies persist through time. I first argue that a conatus is the self-maintaining activity of a mode and not a tendency toward self-preservation or some kind of force. I then argue that it follows from this theory of conatus that bodies persist through time by having temporal parts. I conclude the paper by arguing that attributing a temporal parts metaphysic to Spinoza is not as (...) implausible or anachronistic as it might first seem to be. (shrink)

The Jewish tradition has important perspectives, history and wisdom that can contribute significantly to crucial contemporary healthcare deliberations. This book is an attempt to show how numerous classic Jewish texts and ideas have significant things to say about some of the most urgent debates in the world of medicine today, with the potential to significantly expand and benefit the field of bioethics. But this book is not only about applying classical Jewish values to bioethical dilemmas. It seeks to develop an (...) approach that is primarily informed by personal and communal obligations and social responsibilities. Jewish values focus on requirements, obligations, and commandments, and has thus sometimes been called an "Ethics of Responsibility," by advancing new relevant approaches that can encourage healthcare providers to remain dedicated to preventing harm and providing compassionate care to all, based on these inspiring and timeless values. Each chapter of this book explores questions such as: "Are we expected to risk our lives on behalf of others?" "When we can only help a limited number of people, how do we prioritize?" "What are the obligations and expectations of a society or government?" "Are issues of cultural sensitivity relevant in how we discharge our obligations to others?" "What should we do when obligations for others violate our own moral principles or commitments?" "Are there limits to how far one can be expected to go for others?" These and other issues are addressed in this book, as it attempts to describe a meaningful and compassionate Jewish bioethic of responsibility for our times. (shrink)

Jewish medical ethics presented in light of the most contemporary medical information and rabbinic rulings. The author provides guidance to facilitate complex decision-making for the most common medical dilemmas today, such as surrogacy, assisted suicide, and end-of-life issues.